Development and Characterisation of an Actively Mode-Locked Semiconductor Fibre Laser Incorporating a Nonlinear Optical Loop Mirror Operating at 10 GHz to 160 GHz

The ever increasing demand for greater bandwidth has fuelled the research and development of optical communication systems that can operate at higher and higher speeds. Therefore, wavelength tunable optical sources capable of generating short pulses at high repetition rates have garnered an increasing amount of interest. Actively mode-locked fibre lasers have been widely investigated and used to create such optical sources. The use of all-optical mode-locked lasers is particularly interesting because they are not limited by electronic bottlenecks and can potentially scale much better at higher data rates.;This thesis presents an all-optical mode-locked semiconductor fibre laser (ML-SFL) incorporating a nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM). 10 GHz, 40 GHz, 80 GHz, and 160 GHz operation is demonstrated. The performance of this laser is investigated for different intracavity settings such as the type of highly nonlinear fibre (HNLF) within the NOLM, filter bandwidth, and operating wavelength. The ML-SFL is also characterised under different input pump signal conditions. The results of these experiments can be used to optimize the design of the ML-SFL for pulse generation or all-optical synchronization applications.