A finesse-enhanced Er-doped-fiber ring resonator

A two-coupler-type Er-doped-fiber ring resonator that compensates for the round-trip optical loss by optical amplification is proposed. Also proposed is a mode-filtered heterodyne method for resonant-linewidth measurements which does not demand narrow-linewidth light sources, but uses the beat noise between two uncorrelated lights filtered by the resonator passband. With this method, a finesse >or=500 and a resonant linewidth >