Saturable absorption in multi-core fiber couplers

TL;DR

This paper investigates the saturable absorption properties of multi-core fiber couplers, finding that increasing the number of cores does not significantly improve performance, as shown through simulations of pulse characteristics.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of saturable absorption in multi-core fiber couplers with different core counts, highlighting the limited benefits of higher core numbers.

Findings

All tested fiber couplers exhibit similar saturable absorption performance.

No significant performance gain is observed when increasing core number.

Pulse characteristics are comparable across different multi-core configurations.

Abstract

The saturable absorption characteristics of two-, three-, and five-core one-dimensional fiber coupler arrays and the seven-core hexagonal fiber coupler array are investigated. It is shown that the performance of all these saturable absorbers are comparable and not much is gained, if anything, by going from a two-core nonlinear coupler geometry to a higher number of cores. This observation is supported by the similarity of the saturable absorption curves, as well as comparable pulse characteristics obtained from the simulation of a generic mode-locked fiber laser cavity.