Relative phase locking of pulses in a passively mode-locked fiber laser

In a passively mode-locked fiber ring laser, we report the experimental observation of relative phase locking of pulses in a wide variety of cases. Relative phase locking is observed in bunches of N pulses separated by more than 20 pulse widths as well as in close pulse pairs. In the latter case, the phase relationship between the two pulses is measured to be +/-pi/2, which is related to theoretical predictions formerly obtained from a Ginzburg-Landau distributed model. We have developed a simplified numerical model adapted to our laser, which keeps its essential features while significantly reducing the number of free parameters. The agreement with the experiment is excellent. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.