Saturable absorption in multicore fiber couplers

The saturable absorption characteristics of two-, three-, and five-core one-dimensional fiber coupler arrays and the seven-core hexagonal fiber coupler array are investigated. It is shown that the performance of all these saturable absorbers is comparable and not much is gained, if anything, by going from a two-core nonlinear coupler geometry to a higher number of cores. This observation is supported by the similarity of the saturable absorption curves, as well as comparable pulse characteristics obtained from the simulation of a generic mode-locked fiber laser cavity. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America