Abstract

Several applications of rare-earth-doped fibers, including short pulse fiber lasers,¹ single frequency fiber lasers,² and gyroscopic strain sensors,³ are limited by polarization crosstalk; fiber lasers based on polarization preserving rare-earth-doped fibers offer the possibility of alleviating or circumventing some of these constraints. Towards that end, we have initiated detailed studies of the polarization properties of fiber lasers based on polarization preserving rare-earth-doped fibers. We have initially investigated the polarization properties of fiber lasers based on Nd-doped highly biréfringent elliptical-core fibers. Our results indicate polarization dependent gain, with a larger gain for the polarization along the major axis of the fiber, presumably due to the stronger mode confinement of this polarization in the elliptical core fiber.

© 1994 Optical Society of America