Stability of short, single-mode erbium-doped fiber lasers

We conducted a detailed study of the stability of short, erbium-doped fiber lasers fabricated with two UV-induced Bragg gratings written into the doped fiber. We find that the relative intensity noise of single-longitudinal-mode fiber grating lasers is approximately 3 orders of magnitude lower than that of a single-frequency 1.523-mum helium-neon laser. The frequency noise spectrum contains few resonances, none of which exceeds 0.6 kHz/Hz(1/2) rms; the integrated rms frequency noise from 50 Hz to 63 kHz is 36 kHz. We also demonstrate a simple method for monitoring the laser power and number of oscillating modes during laser fabrication.