Mode-locked fiber lasers based on doped fiber arrays.

We designed a new kind of mode-locked fiber laser based on fiber arrays, where the central core is doped. A theoretical model is given for an all-fiber self-starting mode-locked laser based on this kind of doped fiber array. Two different kinds of fiber lasers with negative dispersion and positive dispersion are simulated and discussed. The stable mode-locked pulses are generated from initial noise conditions by the realistic parameters. The process of self-starting mode-locking multipulse transition and the relationship between the energy of the central core and the propagation distance of the pulses are discussed. Finally, we analyze the difference between the averaged mode-locked laser and the discrete mode-locked laser.