Self-injection locked low-noise Brillouin random fiber laser via dynamic fiber grating for QAM coherent communication
Liang Zhang, Haozhe Shou, Yiyang Feng, Zhengxuan Li, Mengshi Zhu, Heming Wei, Yingxiong Song, Fufei Pang, Tingyun Wang
Abstract
A low-noise Brillouin random fiber laser (BRFL) based on dynamic fiber grating (DFG)-assisted self-injection locking (SIL) as a laser carrier for coherent communication is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The utilization of the DFG-based SIL basically guarantees an innovative purification of ultra-narrow-linewidth laser radiation after the removal of residual random modes from the gain competition, enabling unprecedented long-term frequency-stabilized coherent lasing resonance over a record of 30 s. Consequently, the relative intensity noise of the generated Stokes random laser is significantly suppressed by ∼20 dB, and the frequency/phase noise imposed by random mode hopping is additionally mitigated. Meanwhile, stimulated Brillouin scattering and randomly distributed Rayleigh scattering along the kilometer-long single-mode fiber further suppress laser frequency/phase noise, benefiting the ultra-narrow laser linewidth of 450 Hz. As a proof-of-concept, an 8-Gbaud (32 Gb/s) 16-quadrature amplitude modulation transmission based on the proposed self-injection locked low-noise BRFL as the laser carrier is demonstrated, achieving a low bit error rate of 3.02×10−5. The impact of the laser noise on coherent communication is systematically investigated, highlighting the potential in high-capacity coherent communication.