CW-pumped polarization-maintaining Brillouin fiber ring laser: I. Self-structuration of Brillouin solitons

Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) of a cw-pump in a low optical fiber ring cavity generates for a given gain G below a critical feedback Rcrit a backward soliton Stokes pulse at the roundtrip repetition rate, through resonant three-wave interaction between the optical pump wave and backward Stokes wave, and a high frequency (GHz) axial acoustic wave. In Part I, we perform a systematic experimental and numerical exploration of the whole soliton localisation domain for a large set of (G,R) parameters, in a polarization-maintaining Brillouin fiber ring laser in the best conditions of stability and coherence, and we confirm the excellent quantitative agreement of the coherent three-wave model and the experiments. published in Commun. 257 319-333 (2006) ∗correspondig author [email protected] 1 ha l-0 04 60 39 0, v er si on 1 28 F eb 2 01 0 Author manuscript, published in "Optics Communications 257 (2006) 319–333" DOI : 10.1016/j.optcom.2005.07.049