High brightness, high SNR radio-frequency signal generated by an all-fibered linear-polarization single-mode dual-frequency fiber laser.

A high brightness, high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) linear-polarization optically generated radio-frequency signal is demonstrated based on an all-fibered master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) configuration. The seed signal is generated by beating two different frequency beams which are split from the same single frequency laser source. One beam has initial frequency and the other beam is shifted by 200 MHz using an acoustic-optical modulator. The combined beam contains two frequency components with a frequency difference of 200 MHz and this dual-frequency laser signal is then amplified by a three-stage all-fibered amplifier. In order to obtain high brightness output, a single mode fiber with 10 μm core diameter is adopted in the amplifier chain. A designed step-distribution strain is applied on the active fiber for the suppression of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) effect. As a result, up to 143 W output power is achieved with the slop efficiency of 81.4%. The beam quality factors (M) are measured to 1.06 (Mx2) and 1.04 (My2) and the SNR is up to 54.7 dB. These two frequency components with a certain frequency gap can be identically amplified via the fiber amplifier and the beat note stability, modulation depth as well as SNR are well maintained before and after amplification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest reported brightness of the optically generated radio-frequency signal.