Study of Random Fibre Lasers and Applications

Abstract

The properties of two novel random fibre lasers, in which stimulated Brillouin scattering supplies the effective gain mechanism and Rayleigh scattering along the standard telecommunication optical fibre provides random distributed feedback, are characterised. Firstly, ultra-narrow microwave signals with a Dirac delta function profile are successfully created by beating two random-lasing near-Gaussian beams, arising from the synchronization of optical modes from two Stokes signals with random phase accumulated over the ultra-long optical fibre. This finding provides a completely new approach to synthesise high spectral purity microwave signals from Brillouin fibre lasers with randomised feedback. In addition, we also develop a theoretical model of the random fibre Fabry-Pérot resonator based on the fact that the pump depletion effect naturally selects out the effective Rayleigh feedback regions localised in both ends of this long fibre. A narrow random-laser output with the linewidth of ~860 Hz is experimentally demonstrated and is employed to characterise the linewidth of the pump light. Furthermore, the random laser dynamics is studied and one application towards the physical entropy source is eventually achieved.