We present a theoretical analysis and an experimental study of the impacts of external optical feedback on dualfrequency fiber lasers. The external optical feedback can effectively suppress the phase noise of the beat notes of dual-frequency fiber lasers, provided some requirements are satisfied. The polarization of the optical feedback is important for the fiber laser＇s stability, and it can also tune the beat note frequency. A side effect of external optical feedback, as demonstrated in the experiments, is lowering the sensitivity of the dual-frequency fiber laserbased sensors, although such degradation is not obvious.
A novel scheme of differential polarization demodulation is presented and demonstrated based on a polarized asym- metrical Mach-Zehnder interferometer configuration with polarization control. To enhance the stability of the demodulator, a phase-lock device is designed, and it is composed of a symmetric 3 × 3 coupler and a feedback circuit. For further estab- lishing a differential polarization-shift keying （DPolSK） transmission system, we successfully carry out the demodulation experiments on 10-Gb/s DPolSK optical signals for the first time. Due to the all-optical structure with phase-lock, our scheme is available to realize the DPolSK optical communication in practical optical fiber systems.
