Fiber Random Grating and Its Applications
Creators: name: Xu, Yanping
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2017
Subjects: Fiber Optics
Fiber-Optic Sensors
Fiber Lasers
Chaotic Semiconductor Lasers

description: Femtosecond (fs) laser micromachining has been a useful technique either to modify and remove materials or to change the properties of a material, and can be applied to transparent and absorptive substances. Recently high-power fs laser radiation has drawn intensive attention for the induction of refractive index change to fabricate micro-structures in dielectric materials. This thesis studies the optical properties of a novel fiber random grating fabricated by fs laser micromachining technique and extends its applications from optical sensing to random fiber lasers and optical random bit generations. The thesis mainly consists of three parts. In the first part, the physical mechanism behind the fs laser micromachining technique and the fabrication of the fiber random grating are introduced. By employing a wavelength-division spectral cross-correlation algorithm, a novel multi-parameter fiber-optic sensor based on the fiber random grating is proposed and demonstrated to realize simultaneous measurements of temperature, axial strain, and surrounding refractive index. In the second part, Brillouin random fiber laser (BRFL) and Erbium-doped fiber random laser (EDFRL) are introduced, respectively. Firstly, we propose a novel Brillouin random fiber laser with a narrow linewidth of ~860 Hz based on the bi-directionally pumped stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in a 10-km-long optical fiber. A random fiber Fabry-Perot (FP) resonator is built up through the pump depletion effects of SBS at both ends of the fiber. The novel laser is successfully applied for linewidth characterization beyond 860 Hz of light source under test. Secondly, the random grating-based FP resonator is introduced to build up a novel BRFL with narrow-linewidth of ~45.8Hz and reduced lasing threshold. The intensity and frequency noises of the proposed random laser are effectively suppressed due to the reduced resonating modes and mode competition. Finally, the fiber random grating is used as random distributed feedback in an EDFRL to achieve both static (temperature, strain) and dynamic (ultrasound) parameter sensing. Multiple lasing lines with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) up to 40dB are achieved, which gives an access for a high-fidelity multiple-static-parameter sensing application. By monitoring the wavelength shifts of each peak, temperature and strain have been simultaneously measured with small errors. The fiber random grating in the EDFRL is also able to sense the ultrasound waves. By achieving single mode lasing with the EDFRL, ultrasound waves with frequencies from 20kHz to 0.8MHz could be detected with higher sensitivity and SNR improvement up to 20dB compared with conventional piezoelectric acoustic sensors. In the third part, we demonstrate that a semiconductor laser perturbed by the distributed feedback from a fiber random grating can emit light chaotically without the time delay signature (TDS). A theoretical model is developed by modifying the Lang-Kobayashi model to numerically explore the chaotic dynamics of the laser diode subjected to the random distributed feedback. It is predicted that the random distributed feedback is superior to the single reflection feedback in suppressing the TDS. In experiments, The TDS with the maximum suppression is achieved with a value of 0.0088, which is the smallest to date.