An optical pulse generator from a sinusoidal optical signal using Sagnac loop - Self-sampling

It is experimentally shown an original optical pulse generator able to produce pulses at MHz rate with few ns timewidth at 1/3 of input period. It is based on the self-switched Semiconductor Laser Amplifier Loop Mirror (SLALOM) configuration. The input is a sinusoidal signal in the C-band and the output is amplified pulses. Numerical simulations are also carried out and shown that GHz & ps pulse generation is possible. Besides their usefulness as an optical pulse generator, application in self-sampling is also discussed.