Relative phase locking of pulses in a passively mode-locked fiber laser

In a passively mode-locked fiber ring laser, we report the experimental observation of relative phase locking of pulses in a wide variety of cases. Relative phase locking is observed in bunches of N pulses separated by more than 20 pulse widths as well as in close pulse pairs. In the latter case, the phase relationship between the two pulses is measured to be ±π/2, which is related to theoretical predictions formerly obtained from a Ginzburg-Landau distributed model. We have developed a simplified numerical model adapted to our laser, which keeps its essential features while significantly reducing the number of free parameters. The agreement with the experiment is excellent. © 2003 Optical …