SELF-STARTING LOW-NOISE FIBER SOLITON LASER

We report a self-starting passively mode-locked soliton source generat ing 1-ps-wide pulses. The laser is configured as a ring with an erbium -doped fiber gain medium, a length of conventional fiber that provides the required dispersion and Kerr nonlinearity, and an intracavity mul tiple-quantum-well optical amplifier that serves as a saturable absorb er and pulse stabilizer. The laser exhibits low timing jitter and low amplitude noise.