Attosecond Timing Jitter From an NALM Mode-Locked Er:Fiber Laser on "Optical Cubes"

We demonstrated a 100-MHz Er-doped fiber laser mode locked by nonlinear amplifying loop mirror with low timing jitter on the "optical cubes" structure. The laser employed an all polarization-maintaining configuration. To guide the experimental construction, a numerical simulation of the laser was implemented via the generalized nonlinear Schr & ouml;dinger equation and Jones matrices. The laser configuration with the optimal output performance was adopted in the experiment. With the contribution of the "optical cubes" structure, the laser exhibited a good repetition frequency (f(r)) stability. The root-mean-square (RMS) free-running f(r) drift was 106.72 Hz without temperature control over 20 hours. In free-running operation, the short-term overlapping Allan deviation of f(r) at 1 s reached the level of 4.47x10(-10). Furthermore, utilizing the balanced optical cross-correlator method, we measured the timing jitter for the direct output from the laser without amplification and pulse compression. The free-running RMS timing jitter was as low as 99.63 as in the integration range of 10 kHz to 1 MHz. The dominant noise source was analyzed with well-established analytic model.