Dynamics of passively phased fiber laser arrays.

This paper considers a passively phased array of N rare earth doped fibers that are mutually locked in phase though coherent interaction in a spatially filtering external cavity. By linear stability analysis and numerical simulations, it is shown that, for one fiber, the system has a stable CW regime above threshold, for low pumping powers. Is is also shown that the system can become unstable for high pump intensities first exhibiting pulsating behavior and then becoming chaotic. For two fibers these dynamical regimes the instabilities appear for lower powers as the difference in length between the fibers is increased.