Abstract

Fiber lasers operating via Raman gain or based on rare-earth doped active fibers are widely used as sources of CW radiation. However these lasers are only quasi-CW: their intensity fluctuates strongly on short time-scales and they are usually described within the NLSE model [1]. On the contrary, mode-locked pulsed lasers could be well modelled in terms of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (GLE). By replacing cubic nonlinear gain with a nonlinear loss term, one may obtain a variety of mode-locked regimes, including those of very irregular time dynamics which could be referred to as turbulent emission [2]. Here we show that CW Raman fiber lasers could be surprisingly described within the framework of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation.

© 2015 IEEE