Wave plate-dependent lasing regimes transitions in an all-normal-dispersion fiber laser mode-locked by nonlinear polarization rotation

Abstract We address the transitions between three different working regimes of an all-normal-dispersion pulsed fiber laser, mode-locked by nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR). In particular, we investigate numerically the dynamics and study in details the transitions induced by solely rotating the cavity wave plates. We analyze the phemomenon by putting forward a model for all-normal-dispersion NPR-moded-locked fiber laser, based on the coupled Ginzburg-Landau equations and Jones matrix. Numerical results show that depending on the values of the cavity parameters, the transitions between the dissipative soliton regime and amplifier similariton one, or the transition between the dissipative soliton regime and the splitting pulse one may be realized by simply rotating the cavity wave plates. We found that the transitions are intrinsically related to the NPR mode-locking mechanism by explicitly evaluating the polarization states across the pulse at different locations of the cavity. Our numerical results are in very good agreement with experimental results reported in the relevant literature, and provide evidence that besides gain saturation and spectral filtering, the orientations of wave plates may be exploited as a suitable degree of freedom to obtain the desired pulse regimes in all-normal-dispersion fiber lasers.