Development of composite cavity fibre lasers for fibre laser hydrophone systems

In this thesis, my main focus was to establish a novel composite-cavity fibre laser (CCFL) and to apply it in sensing, particularly in the hydrophone application. The CCFL that I have proposed is formed by writing three wavelength matched fibre Bragg gratings directly into a continuous length of doped fibre. I have also examined the relative advantages and disadvantages of interferometric and intensity-based hydrophone systems, and have established a hydrophone system that can be switched between the two modes of operation, by making use of digital signal processing.I have established a theoretical model to study the lasing and spectral characteristics of the CCFL. My analysis showed that whilst the CCFL have significantly different phase and threshold conditions from the common semiconductor diode lasers with external cavity, the CCFL also have mode-limiting properties that are often sought after. Through simulations, I was able to identify that a non-uniform straining scheme, that is, when one of the sub-cavities of the CCFL is restrained from strain, can improve the sensitivitywith respect to existing single cavity fibre lasers, in both the frequency and intensity domains. My simulations also showed that the sensitivity of such a straining scheme can be optimised by tuning the reflectivity of the gratings, sub-cavity lengths, dopingconcentration and pump power.I have fabricated multiple CCFLs using the in-house grating writing facilities, and have experimentally assessed their power and spectral related lasing characteristics. Whilst having a significantly longer total cavity length compared to typical fibre lasers, theCCFLs demonstrated stable single longitudinal mode operation and narrow linewidth in the order for a few tens of kHz. Asymmetric output power and frequency as a result of unequal sub-cavity lengths were also examined. Finally, I conducted sensing experiments by applying the CCFLs in strain monitoring and intensity-based hydrophone. My results showed that the non-uniform straining scheme had significantly improved the intensity response of the CCFL, and that the acoustic pressure and frequency can be determined by directly sampling and applying Fourier transform to the output intensity of the fibre laser