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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 32, NO.

1, JANUARY 1, 2014

27

Modeling and Analysis of Fiber Bragg Grating Based


Visible Pr3+-Doped Fiber Lasers
Jun Shi, Ming Tang, Senior Member, IEEE, Songnian Fu, Ping Shum, Senior Member, IEEE, and Deming Liu

AbstractWith development of high power GaN laser diode


(LD) and Bragg gratings writing in fluoride glass and fibers, its
necessary and important to develop a numerical model for visible
down conversion Pr3 + -doped fiber (PDF) lasers based on GaN LD
and fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) to optimize its performance for
practical use. We propose a numerical model to investigate both
steady state and Q-switching dynamics of a visible down conversion PDF lasers. FBGs are placed at both ends of PDF to form a
linear cavity. First, the effect of fiber length, boundary reflectivity
and the doping concentration on the output power at steady state
was obtained and analyzed. The simulation result at steady state
qualitatively agree well with previous experimental demonstrations
and the FBG based cavity exhibits advantages over conventional
PDF system in terms of low threshold and high slope efficiency.
After that, by modulating the reflecting spectrum of FBG by using a piezoelectric transducer, Q-switched pulse behavior has been
established to illustrate the impact of FBG feedback, pulse repetition frequency (PRF), pumping power, boundary reflectivity and
the doping concentration on pulse shape and pulse characteristics.
The larger gain factor is found to be the main reason to explain
obvious multipeaks, spurious pulses, and considerable energy leakage in red color Q-switching process. Methods to mitigate above
mentioned phenomenon have been proposed and demonstrated in
this paper.
Index TermsFiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), fiber lasers, fluoride
glass, praseodymium-doped fiber, Q-switching.

I. INTRODUCTION
ISIBLE lasers, especially those emitting RGB colors are
indispensable for applications like laser display, optical
storage and biomedicine, etc. Among many candidates, the visible fiber laser based on trivalent Pr3+ -ions in fiber host has
received much attention because it can offer several transitions
in red, orange, green, and blue spectral regions, tunability, and it
owns advantages of typical fiber lasers like excellent beam quality, efficient energy conversion, small footprint, flexible configuration and extraordinary heat dissipating capability.
In Pr3+ -doped fiber (PDF) lasers, the visible laser can be
obtained by either infrared pump source or blue-violet pump

Manuscript received May 16, 2013; revised October 21, 2013; accepted October 29, 2013. Date of publication November 6, 2013; date of current version
November 25, 2013. This work was supported in part by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grant 61107087 and Fundamental Research
Funds for the Central Universities (HUST: 2011TS061).
J. Shi, M. Tang, S. Fu, and D. Liu are with the Next generation Internet
Access National Engineering lab, School of Optical and Electronic
Information, and Wuhan National laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong
University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China (e-mail:
shijun93@163.com; tangming@mail.hust.edu.cn; songnian@mail.hust.edu.cn;
dmliu@mail.hust.edu.cn).
P. Shum is with the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 637553
(e-mail: shenpingperry@gmail.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2013.2289858

source, which corresponds to up-conversion or down-conversion


process, respectively. Because the lack of the low cost, high
power pump source in blue wavelength range in the past, the simulation and experimental research is focus on the up-conversion
process [1]. As the rapid development of GaN LD, the research
focus of PDF laser has been switched to the down-conversion
process [2][6]. Red, cyan and green transitions were obtained
by GaN LD pumped Pr3+ : ZBLAN fiber laser, and the strongest
transition is at 635 nm with 44 mW output power [2]; Okamoto
et al. [3] demonstrated over 100 nm RGB tunable laser operation
(479497, 515546, and 597650 nm) using a single 9 cm Pr3+ doped ZBLAN fiber pumped by a GaN-LD in 2009; In 2011,
they further demonstrated a green all-fiber laser by splicing both
ends of a Pr3+ -doped ZBLAN fiber to silica fibers, the output
power and the slope efficiency were 322 mW and 53% [4], respectively; For high power operation, Nakanishi et al. [5], [6]
has demonstrated 645.7 mW (638 nm) and 598 mW (522.2 nm)
laser oscillations by Pr-doped waterproof fluoro-aluminate glass
fiber laser. Since the visible lasing occurs on transitions originating from the 3 P0 ,3 P1 , and 1 I6 levels of praseodymium ions,
which are thermally coupled at room temperature [7], it is necessary to make the reflectivity feedback of other wavelength very
weak to get the low threshold, high power output at a specific
wavelength [5], [6], [17], especially for the green oscillation [6].
Most of the experimental demonstrations of Pr3+ -doped visible fiber laser are based on the dielectric film coated mirrors
and free space optical coupling system. As is demonstrated
in near infra-red wavelength region, the fiber Bragg gratings
(FBGs) based fiber lasers enable all-fiber structure and stable
operation and it will be of great interest to embed FBG in the
Pr3+ -doped visible fiber laser cavity. Although Pr3+ -doped fluoride glass has generally weak photosensitivity to ordinary UV
laser [8], the femtosecond laser based FBG inscription technique in ZBLAN fibers demonstrates efficient rare-earth doped
ZBLAN fiber laser oscillation in the infrared range [9], [10].
The FBG based visible wavelength lasing will be promising and
theoretical modeling and numerical simulation will be essential
to optimize the output performance.
Besides the continuous-wave operation, the FBG based PDF
laser cavity provides the flexibility of Q-switching operation with dynamic grating tuning techniques. The FBG based
Q-switched fiber laser is attractive due to its superior all fiber
structure, low loss, good repeatability, and low cost [11], [12].
But according to the previous simulation and experimental
results [13], [14], there will be spurious components in the
Q-switched pulse and considerable energy leakage from the
high reflectivity (HR) cavity end in FBG based Q-switched fiber
laser. Therefore, it is necessary and important to develop a comprehensive simulation model for FBG based Pr3+ -doped down

0733-8724 2013 IEEE

28

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 32, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2014

Fig. 2.

Fig. 1.

Energy level diagram for praseodymium down-conversion processes.

conversion fiber lasers to optimize the output performance, especially for both steady state and Q-switching pulsed operation.
In this paper, we proposed a numerical model and simulate
the performance of Pr3+ -doped down conversion visible fiber
laser for steady state and Q-switching mechanisms. The all-fiber
laser cavity is constructed with Pr3+ -doped fluoride fiber and
FBGs. The proposed visible laser system has the advantages
such as compact and robust structure, low loss and switchable
operation state between continuous-wave and pulsed output. For
the steady state operation, the output power of green (522.2 nm)
oscillation is smaller and the threshold is much larger than the
red (638 nm) one, which qualitatively agrees well with previous
experimental demonstrations [5], [6]. The calculated optimum
cavity reflectivity for both red and green oscillation is very
close to the reflectivity adopted by [5] and [6]. The FBG based
cavity exhibits advantages over conventional PDF laser system
in terms of low threshold and high slope efficiency, especially
for green output, which shares the same upper energy level with
the red oscillation but has much slower depletion rate than the
red one at lower laser level. The narrow reflection band of FBG
helps to establish the green laser oscillation through effectively
suppressing the red emission. For the Q-switched operation,
although the peak power of red Q-switched pulse is much higher
than the green one, it shows obvious multipeaks and spurious
pulses. Considerable amount of energy will leak out from HR
FBG cavity end for red Q-switching, especially under low pulse
repetition rate as demonstrated by our simulation and reported
experimental results [13]. Physical insights behind the abovementioned phenomena are analyzed, and methods to improve
the output performance are discussed. With the optimized cavity
parameter proposed in this paper, the spurious pulses can be
effectively removed; the energy leakage from HR FBG cavity
end can be at least suppressed to as low as 0.39% of total output
energy; and the peak power of the red output pulse can be as
high as 1500 watt under only 1 watt GaN LD pumping.
II. MODELING
A. Down-Conversion in Praseodymium Ion Energy Diagram
Fig. 1 shows the energy level diagram, pumping scheme, and
transitions for praseodymium ion in fluoride glass. Visible lasing occurs on transitions originating from the 3 P0 ,3 P1 , and 1 I6
levels of praseodymium ions. These three levels are thermally

Configuration of a typical FBG-based Pr3 + -doped fiber laser.

coupled at room temperature [7] thus we can label them as level


2. The 3 P1 and 1 I6 levels are nearly degenerate, so they will be
referred to collectively as the 3 P1 level in the discussion below.
The 638 and 523 nm transitions, from 3 P0 to 3 F2 and 3 P1 to
3
H5 , are four-level systems. 482 nm transition is quasi-threelevel system and there is signal re-absorption from the ground
state. The lifetime of the 3 P1 and 3 P0 coupled manifold of Pr3+
in fluoride glass fibers varies from host to host and has been
reported in the range of 4050 s [7], [15], [16]. Since the life
time of level 3 F2 is 3 ns [15], we can assume that the population in level 3 F2 transfers to level 3 H6 instantaneously, thus
the population density of level 3 F2 is almost zero. The energy
difference between 3 H6 and 3 H5 level and energy difference
between 3 H5 and 3 H4 is about 2000 cm1 . Since the life time
of 3 H5 is 2.7 s [15] and according to the non-radiative rate
formula, for one material, the non-radiative rate is dependent
on the energy difference thus the life time of 3 H6 is comparable to that of 3 H5 . From [15], the non-radiative rate from level
3
P2 ,3 F2 ,3 H6 and 3 H5 is far more than the radiative rate, thus
we will neglect the radiative transitions from these energy levels
in rate equations. The life time of level 3 P2 is 25 ns as given
in [15].
B. Rate Equations of Pr3+ -Doped Fiber Laser
Fig. 2 shows our proposed FBG-based linear cavity PDF
laser for both steady state and Q-switching operation. A segment of Pr3+ -doped single mode fiber is spliced between two
uniform FBGs (UFBGs) to form the laser resonator. FBG1 is
fixed for unchanged spectrum, while FBG2 is attached to a
piezoelectric transducer (PZT). FBG2 works as a fixed reflector
in steady state, but is modulated at certain repetition frequency
for Q-switching. Due to the wavelength selectivity of FBGs, the
amplified spontaneous emission light out of the FBG reflection
window is suppressed effectively. Therefore, only the signal
light at the wavelength s with certain bandwidth is considered
in this model. Single mode pump laser at the wavelength p is
coupled into PDF by a wavelength division multiplexer.
The praseodymium dopant concentration in this PDF is assumed to be uniform along the fiber. We also neglect the uneven
dopant concentration distribution across the fiber core and the
effect of Rayleigh scattering due to its short length. With these
assumptions, the rate equations for red Pr-doped fiber laser are:
N0 (z, t) + N1  (z, t) + N1 (z, t) + N2 (z, t) + N3 (z, t) = N (1)
N1 
= N2 (z, t)A21  +N1 (z, t)/1 N1  (z, t)/1 
t

(2)

SHI et al.: MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF FIBER BRAGG GRATING BASED VISIBLE PR3 + -DOPED FIBER LASERS

N1
= N2 (z, t)Wse R +N2 (z, t)A21 N1 (z, t)/1
t
N2
= N3 (z, t)/3 N2 (z, t)Wse R N2 (z, t)/2
t
N3
= N0 (z, t)Wpa R N3 (z, t)Wpe R N3 (z, t)/3 .
t
The rate equations for green PDF laser are:

(3)

29

TABLE I
PARAMETERS USED IN THE SIMULATIONS

(4)
(5)

N0 (z, t) + N1  (z, t) + N2 (z, t) + N3 (z, t) = N

(6)

N1 
= N2 (z, t)Wse G +N2 (z, t)A21  N1  (z, t)Wsa G
t
N1  (z, t)/1 
(7)
N2
= N3 (z, t)/3 + N1  (z, t)Wsa
t
N2 (z, t)/2
N3
= N0 (z, t)Wpa
t
where

N2 (z, t)Wse

(8)

N3 (z, t)Wpe

N3 (z, t)/3 (9)

Wsa,se =

s [Ps+ (z) + Ps (z)]sa,se s


Aco hc

(10)

Wpa,pe =

p [Pp+ (z) + Pp (z)]pa,pe p


Aco hc

(11)

works for both red and green transitions.


The power propagation equations for red PDF laser are:
Pp R

1 Pp R
= p
p R t

R (N3 pe R

N0 pa

Pp R (z, t) p

R)

R Pp R (z, t)

(12)

Ps R
z

Ps R

1
s

= s

R N2 se

+
R Ps R (z, t)

s R Ps R (z, t)

+ s

R N2 se R

2hc

/3s R .

The power propagation equations for green PDF laser are:


Pp G
z

1 Pp G
= p
p G t

G (N3 pe G

N0 pa

Pp G (z, t) p

G)

G Pp G (z, t)

(14)

Ps G
z

1
s G

Ps G
t

= s

G [N2 se G

Pp+ (0, t) = W1 + Rp 1 Pp (0, t)

(16)

Pp (L, t) = Rp2 Pp+ (L, t)

(17)

Rs1 (t)Ps (0, t)

(18)

Ps (L, t) = Rs2 (t)Ps+ (L, t)

(19)

Ps+ (0, t)
(13)

concentration, N0 , N1 , N1 , N2 and N3 represent population


densities of the energy level 3 H4 ,3 H5 ,3 H6 ,3 P0 +3 P1 and 3 P2 ,
respectively. 1 , 1 , 2 and 3 are the lifetime of energy level
3
H5 ,3 H6 ,3 P0 +3 P1 and 3 P2 , respectively. Wsa , Wse , Wpa and
Wp e are the absorption and emission rates for signal s and
pump p . In the power propagation equations, the pump and

(z, t), in which the + and


signal power are represented byPp,s
signs denote forward and backward propagating directions. sa ,
se , pa and p e are the absorption and emission cross-sections
for s and p , respectively. s and p are the background loss
coefficients for signal and pump. p and s are the group velocities of pump and signal in the fiber, c is the light velocity
in the vacuum. p and s are the power filling factor for signal
and pump. Since we assume single mode confinement of pump
and signal, the power filling factors are set to 1 in this simulation. The signal has a 3-dB bandwidth of , which is determined by FBGs reflection bandwidth. h is the Planks constant,
and 2hc2 /3s represents the contribution of the spontaneous
emission into s . The boundary conditions are given by:

N1  sa

G]

where Wl is the pump power that coupled into the left end of
PDF. L is the fiber length. Rp1 and Rp2 are the cavity reflectivity
for pump at both ends of the laser cavity, and the time dependent
Rs1 (t) and Rs2 (t) represent the effective cavity reflectivity of
signal at both ends of PDF. Under the lasing condition, the
output power and pulse energy are given by
Pout (t) = (1 Rs2 )Ps+ (L, t)
 t2
Eout =
Pout (t)dt.

(20)
(21)

t1

Ps+ G (z, t) s
+ s

G N2 se

G Ps G (z, t)

2hc2 /3s

G.

(15)
In the above equations, the suffix R and G represent red
and green transitions, respectively. N is the total Pr3+ ions

III. SIMULATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS


A. Parameters Used in the Simulations
The key parameters used in the simulations are given in Table I, which are mainly from [16], [17]. The power propagation equations can be solved iteratively using the Runge-Kutta

30

Fig. 3. Steady-state simulation result of output power versus: (a) pumping


power, (b) fiber length, (c) reflectivity of FBG2, and (d): doping concentration.

algorithm. For steady state, two UFBGs with different peak reflectivity form a linear cavity and for Q-switching operation,
FBG2 is modulated at certain repetition frequency by the PZT
adhesive to it. The Bragg wavelength of FBG2 is detuned with
respect to FBG1 periodically. A lower laser cavity Q factor is
produced when the reflection peak of FBG2 is offset by a certain
wavelength with FBG1, while Q-switched pulse will be generated when the wavelength of reflectivity peaks of two FBGs
are close enough. The rise time and fall time of the PZT are
fixed at 5 s and the duty cycle of the Q-switching is set to
be 50%. Time-variant effective cavity reflectivity Rs1 (t) and
Rs2 (t) in the boundary conditions can be calculated using the
method mentioned in [14]. The propagation equations can be
numerically solved using finite difference method hence to get
the output power and pulses energy.

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 32, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2014

dramatically compared with the red oscillation, and the reflectivity of FBG2 for green oscillation needs to be much larger
than the red one to establish laser oscillation. The output power
only has negligible increment when the doping concentration >
5000 ppm for both red and green oscillation.
The numerical results qualitatively agree well with previous
experimental demonstrations [5], [6]. The optimum reflectivity
of FBG2 for red and green wavelength in our simulation is 89%
and 95%, respectively, which agree very well with the cavity
reflectivity used by [5] and [6], in which 81.5% and 94.9% of
reflectivity are selected for red and green laser operation, respectively. In [5], the threshold power and slope efficiency of
PDF laser emitting 638 nm are approximately 138.2 mW and
53% considering the coupling efficiency from GaN LD to fiber
and the reflection/diffraction loss due to components. While
our simulation results are 125 mW and 62.35% correspondingly. The deviation of simulation and experimental result may
be caused by the following reasons. First, the peak wavelength
and the emitting area of LD are increase with the increase of
the output power of the GaN LD [17]. Second, we assume the
power filling factor of the pumping and signal to be 1 in the
simulation, but most of experimental works have multimode
profile. The threshold power and slope efficiency relative to the
power coupled into PDF are 189 mW and 44% in our green PDF
laser simulation, while the experimental results [6] are 328 mW
and 38%. The FBG based laser cavity could be the main reason for the difference of green PDF laser simulation and experimental results, especially on the threshold power. Because
visible lasing all occurs on transitions originating from the thermally coupled energy levels (3 P0 ,3 P1 ), and the FBG cavity in
the simulation offers a narrow reflection band compared with the
dielectric multilayered coatings used in the experiment. With the
spectral filtering effect, the in-band green laser oscillation could
be established much easier when other out-of-band wavelength
laser oscillation can be suppressed by the weak reflectivity of
the FBG. FBG-based cavity thus exhibits advantages over conventional PDF system in terms of low threshold and high slope
efficiency.

B. Steady State Simulation


Fig. 3 shows us the steady state simulation result of FBGbased Q-switch PDF laser. In the figure, (a)(d) represent steady
state output power versus: pumping power, fiber length, reflectivity of FBG2, and doping concentration, respectively, for red
and green laser operation as illustrated by solid and dashed lines.
It can be obviously found that the output power of green oscillation is smaller than red one in most cases. This is mainly because
the emission cross-section of green transition is smaller than the
red one, and the population density on lower energy level of red
transition is close to zero. The output power increases linearly
with the pumping power above the threshold, and the threshold of green oscillation is larger than the red one. There exist
the optimum fiber length and reflectivity of FBG2 for both red
and green laser, but the optimum fiber length for red oscillation
is longer than the green laser while the optimum reflectivity
of FBG2 is smaller. When the fiber length is longer than the
optimum one, the output power of green oscillation decreases

C. Dynamics of Red and Green Q-Switched Pulses


In order to simulate the Q-switching with better accuracy, we
change the pumping power, fiber length, doping concentration
and cavity reflectivity of FBG1 and FBG2 into 1 W, 0.2 m,
1500 ppm, 99.9% and 70%, respectively. The fiber segment
length z used in the simulation is set to be 2 mm. The corresponding time step t is about 0.01 ns, which is short enough
to ensure high temporal resolution for several tens of kilohertz
Q-switching repetition rate simulations.
Figs. 412 represent the Q-switching simulation results.
Fig. 4 illustrates the stabilized Q-switched pulse shape within
one Q-switching period under the pulse repetition rate of 5 kHz.
The upper and lower row are for the red and green Q-switching,
while the left and right column represent the output pulse from
the FBG1 (HR) and FBG2 (LR) cavity end, respectively. The
x-coordinate is scaled with respect to the round trip time Tr ,
which is about 2 ns for 0.2 m linear laser cavity. The peak

SHI et al.: MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF FIBER BRAGG GRATING BASED VISIBLE PR3 + -DOPED FIBER LASERS

31

Fig. 6. The influence of the PRF on the output peak power and energy leakage
percentage for (a) red and (b) green Q-switching.

Fig. 4. Stabilized Q-switched pulse under PRF of 5 kHz: (a) Red, HR,
(b) Red, LR, (c) Green, HR, and (d) Green, LR (T r = 2 ns).

Fig. 5.

Red stabilized Q-switched pulse with PRF from 5 to 45 kHz.

power of red oscillation is much higher than the green one because the red oscillation has much larger emission cross-section
and empty population densities at lower energy band of the
red transition. It also can be seen from Fig. 4 that considerable
amount of energy leaks out from HR FBG cavity end for red
Q-switching; while for green Q-switching, almost all the energy
is output from LR FBG cavity end. There are multipeaks and
spurious pulses on the red Q-switched pulse while the green
Q-switched pulse shape is clean without spurious part. Red Qswitched pulse starts to build up approximately 4.2 s after the Q
switch is on, while about 4.82 s is needed for green Q-switched
pulse, The larger gain factor of red oscillation is responsible for
the earlier formation of the red Q-switched pulse generation.
The differences between red and green Q-switched pulses
characteristics presented in Fig. 4 can be attributed to the fact that
red oscillation has a much larger gain factor, which is mainly
caused by its much larger emission cross-section and empty
population densities at lower energy band of the red transition.
This can be verified by Figs. 57. Fig. 5 presents red stabilized
Q-switched pulse with pulse repetition rate from 5 kHz to
45 kHz. When the pulse repetition frequency (PRF) increases,
the population inversion buildup time and the gain factor decreases. It can be seen from Fig. 5 that the spurious pulse

Fig. 7. Red Q-switched pulse under pulse repetition rate of 5 kHz: The left
column: output from HR cavity end; The right column: output from LR cavity
end (a1, a2) W 1 = 0.5 W, (b1, b2) W 1 = 1 W, (c1, c2) W 1 = 3 W, (d1, d2)
W 1 = 5 W.

disappears for PRF larger than 10 kHz, and the Q-switched


pulse is established at a later time. Also the Q-switched pulse
is cleaner and the peak power is decreased with larger PRFs.
The dependence of the PRF on the peak power output from
HR (FBG1) cavity end, LR (FBG2) cavity end, and the energy
leakage percentage from the HR cavity end(HR/(LR+HR)) for
red and green Q-switching are presented in Fig. 6. It can be
seen from Fig. 6(a) that there will be considerable amount of
energy leakage from HR FBG cavity end, especially when PRF
is low. The detrimental energy leakage can reach as high as
45.7% of the total output energy when the PRF is 5 kHz. The
peak power output from the HR cavity end and energy leakage
percentage decrease significantly when the PRF increases. For
green Q-switching operation, as we can be seen from Fig. 6(b),
the peak power decreases along with the increase of PRF from
5 kHz-45 kHz because the green Q-switched transition does not
generate spurious part at 5 kHz.
Fig. 7 shows the output Q-switched pulse of red laser at different pumping power, with the pulse repetition rate of 5 kHz.
The left and right column are for the output from HR and LR

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Fig. 8.

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 32, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2014

Evolution of FBG1 and FBG2 reflectivity within 5 s.

cavity end, respectively, and the four rows from up to down


represent the simulation results under pumping power of 0.5, 1,
3, and 5 W. From Fig. 7, its apparent to see that the increasing
of pumping power leads to faster generation of the Q-switched
pulse together with multipeak structure and spurious pulse components in one period. The increasing of pumping power also
significantly increases the energy leakage out of the HR cavity
end. From Figs. 57, it can easily be concluded that larger gain
factor (decrease PRF, increase pump power, etc.) cannot contribute to the pulse energy increment smoothly due to energy
leakage, multipeaks and spurious pulses behavior.
The correlation between gain factor and Q-switched pulse
and the phenomenon presented in Figs. 47 can be explained
by Fig. 8, which illustrates the evolution of FBG1 and FBG2
reflectivity within 5 s after the Q switch is on. Fig. 8(a)
presents temporal reflectivity of FBG1 and FBG2 respectively,
while Fig. 8(b) shows the calculated cavity feedback strength
as defined by R1 (t) R2 (t), which also represents the actual
Q-switching behavior. At the initial stage, the cavity exhibits
a very weak feedback due to the small total reflectivity. The
cavity feedback strength increases along the buildup time thus
the threshold condition can be satisfied earlier with larger gain.
Since the reflectivity of FBG1 is less than that of FBG2 at the
beginning of one Q-switching cycle, considerable energy will
leak out from the FBG1 cavity end. The generation of spurious
pulses can be explained by the FBG-based Q-switching property. Due to the sidelobe of FBG, the modulated FBG2 spectrum
will generate temporarily periodic reflection pattern as depicted
in Fig. 8(a). The overall feedback strength also exhibits multipeak structure in one Q-switching period. Therefore, when the
cavity loss increases with lower reflectivity of FBG2 and gain
factor decreases due to the depletion of the inversion population,
the threshold condition can only be fulfilled in a short time segment around feedback strength peak as shown in Fig. 8(b). The
pulse buildup time is not sufficient to deplete all the populations
transition to the lower energy state. The subsequent populations
transition will occur when the cavity loss is less than the gain
factor to allow the spurious pulse formation. The multipeak
phenomenon observed in Q-switched pulses can be explained
by the switching-induced perturbation, and determined by the
rise-time of Q-switching and the inhomogeneous photon density distribution [18]. Due to the short fiber length used in our
system, the round trip time of photon flux in the cavity is much
shorter than the pulse duration hence the Q-switched pulse is

Fig. 9. Red Q-switched pulse with different peak reflectivity of FBG2 (output
from FBG2 cavity end; PRF = 5 kHz).

shaped by the photon density distribution along the fiber. The


fast sweeping of the FBGs reflectivity contributes to the perturbation and it explains more noticeable multi-peak pulses can
be generated with the larger gain or in the red-wavelength oscillation than green one (Green laser oscillation is established
with flatten reflectivity while red laser formation coincides with
steep change in the reflection spectrum).
D. Optimization of the Q-Switched Down-Conversion
PDF System
From the simulation results described above, we can see that
there will be spurious components in the Q-switched pulse and
considerable energy leakage from the FBG1 cavity end when
the gain factor is large enough. Such kind of spurious pulses
and energy leakage obviously lower the peak power and pulse
energy. The undesired spurious pulses are detrimental to many
applications and the energy leakage from the cavity is harmful
to the reliability of the pumping laser. By performing numerical
simulation, we demonstrate in the following that optimization
of the reflectivity of FBG2 and the doping concentration of the
Pr-doped fiber is effective to suppress the spurious pulses and
energy leakage behavior.
To mitigate the spurious components and reduce the energy
leakage from FBG1 of red Q-witching, we need to control the
cavity loss such that the threshold condition can be only fulfilled
when the reflectivity of FBG2 is smaller than FBG1, as implied
by Fig. 8. The most straightforward method is to reduce the
peak reflectivity of FBG2. Therefore, the overall cavity loss
will be increased and the laser oscillation is postponed in one
Q-switching period. The effect is illustrated in Figs. 9 and 10(a)
as it shows the red Q-switched pulse and pulse characteristics
with different peak reflectivity of FBG2. No spurious pulse can
be observed when the peak reflectivity is decreased to 50% and
the output pulse becomes cleaner with further decreasing of
FBG2s peak reflectivity. The peak power of the output pulse

SHI et al.: MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF FIBER BRAGG GRATING BASED VISIBLE PR3 + -DOPED FIBER LASERS

Fig. 10. The influence of the reflectivity of FBG2 on the output peak power
and energy leakage percentage for (a) red and (b) green Q-switching.

Fig. 11. Red Q-switched pulse with different doping concentration (output
from FBG2 cavity end; PRF = 5 kHz).

can be increased with the decreasing of FBG2s peak reflectivity


when the reflectivity is larger than 40%. The maximum peak
power reaches approximately 1.5 kW when the FBG2s peak
reflectivity is 40%. Although further decreasing the FBG2s
peak reflectivity to 20% will decrease the energy leakage from
the HR end to as low as 0.39%, it will cause less peak power
output from both LR and HR cavity ends.
It can be seen from Fig. 10(b) that the optimized peak reflectivity of FBG2 for green Q-switching is 85%. Such high
optimized peak reflectivity compared to red one is due to the
small gain factor of green transition. There is no spurious part
in green Q-switched pulses even the peak reflectivity of FBG2
is as high as 95%.
Choosing a right doping concentration is another method to
effectively suppress the spurious pulse and energy leakage from
FBG1, as shown in Figs. 11 and 12, which is conducted under
the pulse repetition rate of 5 kHz and the pump power of 1 W.
In order to demonstrate the effect of doping concentration on
the suppression of undesired spurious pulses, we set the FBG2s
peak reflectivity at 70% with which obvious spurious pulse and
energy leakage occur as shown in Fig. 9. Fig. 11 shows red
stabilized Q-switched pulse with doping concentration from
300 ppm to16500 ppm. Fig. 12 presents the influence of the
PRF on the output peak power from both cavity ends and pulse

33

Fig. 12. Influence of the doping concentration on the output peak power and
energy leakage percentage for (a) red and (b) green Q-switching.

energy leakage from the HR cavity end, both for red and green
transitions.
From Fig. 11, it can be seen that the peak power of red
Q-switched pulse is increasing when doping concentration increases from 300 to 400 ppm, which is induced by the pump
absorption and population inversion increment. With the further
increment of doping concentration and the population inversion,
the spurious pulse can be observed when doping concentration
increases to 1500 ppm. The second pulse in one Q-switch period is gradually suppressed as the doping concentration further
increases from 1500 to 10500 ppm. This is mainly caused by
two reasons: 1) the first Q-switched pulse buildup is postponed
with higher doping concentration, which is caused by larger loss
related to doping concentration and 2) the aggravation of the inhomogeneous distribution of the population inversion along the
fiber axis with higher doping concentration (the population inversion is decreasing along the fiber axis) means that the first
pulse will deplete more population inversion; hence the second
pulse will be suppressed with higher doping concentration. Because the second pulse is assumed to be the main pulse for its
higher peak power, the suppress of the second pulse will lower
the peak power output from the LR cavity end when doping
concentration is between 15003000 ppm. The same explanation applies to the negative relationship between the doping
concentration and the peak power output from LR cavity end
as shown in Fig. 12(a). The peak power output from LR cavity
end slowly increases when the doping concentration is larger
than 10500 ppm. After the saturation point around 15000 ppm,
the peak power starts to decrease since the cavity loss becomes
dominant in this short laser cavity at very high doping concentration. It can be seen from Fig. 12(b) that, the peak power of
green Q-switched pulse increases from 500 to 1500 ppm, then
starts to decrease after its peak value at 1500 ppm. Since green
transition shows much less spurious pulses and energy leakage
from HR FBG cavity end, the influence of the doping concentration on the output peak power is straightforward and can be
explained simply by the interplay between population inversion
and attenuation.
In conclusion, an efficient numerical model of FBG-based
praseodymium-doped fiber laser has been proposed and developed to investigate the PDF laser performance in the visible
wavelength range. The numerical results of steady state laser
operation qualitatively agree well with previously reported experimental demonstrations. For the steady state operation, since

34

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 32, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2014

the gain factor of red oscillation is larger than the green one, the
output power of green oscillation is smaller and the threshold is
larger than the red wavelength. There exist optimal fiber length
and cavity reflectivity for both red and green oscillation, but the
optimum fiber length for red oscillation is longer than the green
one while the optimum cavity reflectivity is smaller. When the
fiber length is longer than the optimum value, the output power
of green pulse decreases dramatically compared with the red
oscillation, and the reflectivity of FBG2 for green oscillation
need to be much larger than the red one to establish laser oscillation. The output power only has negligible increment when the
doping concentration >5000 ppm for both red and green oscillations. For the Q-switched operation, although the peak power
of red Q-switched pulse are generally much higher than the
green one, the red Q-switched pulse shows obvious multipeak
and spurious components. Considerable amount of energy will
leak out from HR FBG cavity end for red color Q-switching,
especially under the low pulse repetition rate. The differences
in the pulse shape and dynamics between red and green oscillation are caused by the gain factor difference and FBG-based
Q-switching property. Lower the peak reflectivity of FBG2 and
choosing the right doping concentration of PDF can effectively
suppress the spurious pulses and energy leakage from FBG1.
The peak power can be further optimized by choosing suitable
peak reflectivity of FBG2 and the doping concentration of the
PDF. With the comprehensive simulation and analysis given in
this paper, our proposed numerical model will be very useful
in the realization and optimization of PDF based visible downconversion fiber lasers for various applications. Since there is
still no demonstration of ZBLAN-based FBGs in visible wavelength range, the development of ZBLAN-based components
is necessary to experimentally demonstrate the simulated laser
performances in this paper.

[9]
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[17]

[18]

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Jun Shi was born in Anhui Province, China, in 1989. She received the Bachelors
degree from the Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun,
China, in 2010. She is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree under Prof.
Ming Tang within National Engineering Laboratory for Next Generation Internet
Access System, Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Wuhan
National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Wuhan, China. Her research focuses
on the experimental and numerical simulation of direct emitting visible lasers
for many applications.

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Ming Tang (SM11) received the B.Eng. degree from the Huazhong University
of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China, in 2001, and the Ph.D.
degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2005.
His postdoctoral research in Network Technology Research Centre was
focused on the optical fiber amplifiers, high-power fiber lasers, nonlinear fiber
optics, and all-optical signal processing. From February 2009, he was with
Tera-photonics group led by Prof. Hiromasa Ito in RIKEN, Sendai, Japan, as a
Research Scientist conducting research on terahertz-wave generation, detection,
and application using nonlinear optical technologies. Since March 2011, he
has been a Professor in the School of Optical and Electronic Information,
Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, HUST, Wuhan, China. He has
published more than 80 technical papers in the international recognized journals
and conferences. His current research interests include optical fiber-based linear
and nonlinear effects for communication and sensing applications.
Dr. Tang has been a member of IEEE Photonics Society since 2001. He is
also a member of Optical Society of America.

Songnian Fu biography not available at the time of publication.

Ping Shum biography not available at the time of publication.

Deming Liu biography not available at the time of publication.

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