Multiple Four-Wave-Mixing Processes and Their Application to Multiwavelength Erbium-Doped Fiber Lasers

In this paper, a model describing the four-wave mixing (FWM) among an arbitrary amount of incident waves is derived and the predictor-corrector method is exploited to solve the equations. Based on the numerical model, we studied methods to promote the energy exchange among the incident waves. The results show that a proper value of phase mismatch can accelerate the energy exchanging among the pump waves and simultaneously reduces the idler wave powers. This model is applied to investigate the behavior of a multiwavelength erbium-doped fiber laser (MWEDFL) exploiting FWM. According to the simulation, through using a 50-m-long nonlinear fiber with nonlinear coefficient of 11 /W/km, 19 lines can be obtained in the output spectrum with power difference <3 dB.