Mechanisms in passive synchronization of erbium fiber lasers

The optical synchronization of two passively mode-locked erbium fiber lasers in a master-slave geometry is presented. Both lasers were mode-locked via nonlinear polarization rotation and used a shared semiconductor saturable absorber mirror for synchronization. Tight synchronization and transfer of the repetition frequency stability were shown. The contributions of several physical mechanisms to the change in roundtrip time during synchronization are investigated by analyzing the change of different pulse parameters in synchronized state, including carrier envelope offset frequency and spectrum.