Effect of Self-Phase Modulation on The Signal Quality of Fourier Domain Mode-Locked Lasers

In this paper, the impact of self-phase modulation on the noise performance of Fourier Domain Mode-Locked (FDML) lasers is investigated. It is shown that under a relatively high fiber nonlinearity and/or intracavity signal amplitude, an excess amount of noise generation occurs, which can not only lead to poor signal quality, but also operational instability. Hence, particularly for applications requiring relatively high power, careful consideration of the self-phase modulation effect is required.