We report a widely tunable pulsed dysprosium (Dy) -doped fluoride fiber laser within a 545 nm continuous wavelength range around 3 μm, where a home-made random Raman fiber laser (RRFL) at 1.690 μm ...acts as the pump, and a commercial InAs saturable absorber (SA) is adopted as the Q-switcher. The designed RRFL, excited by a 1.055 μm ytterbium-doped fiber oscillator, can provide the 8 th order Stokes emission at 1.690 μm with a high spectral purity of 98.6% and a maximum output power of 14.4 W. Feeding it to a Dy cavity involving an InAs SA and a ruled diffraction grating in a Littrow configuration, stable Q-switching can be initiated and tuned within the continuous/total range of 2.775∼3.320 μm (545 nm)/2.765∼3.338 μm (573 nm), an extension of 50% over the prior 370 nm record Opt. Lett., vol. 44, no. 9, pp. 2322-2325, 2019, representing the widest level to date from a pulsed rare-earth-doped laser at any wavelengths, to the best of our knowledge. When the wavelength is tuned to 2.992 μm, a maximum average power of 106 mW with 460 ns pulse width, 125 kHz repetition rate, and 0.85 μJ pulse energy is achieved. This work marks the first pulsed Dy-doped fluoride fiber laser pumped at ∼1.7 μm while exhibiting the utility of InAs in pulse generation at the wavelengths of 3∼3.4 μm for the first time, to the best of our knowledge. The demonstration highlights the great potential of ∼1.7 μm pumped Dy-doped fluoride fiber laser as a platform for developing widely tunable pulsed sources in the 3 μm region of the mid-infrared.
We demonstrate a novel, robust and compact fiber laser mode-locked by nonlinear polarization evolution (NPE) in polarization-maintaining (PM) fibers. The reflectivity of the artificial saturable ...absorber (SA) is analyzed to explain the mode-locking mechanism in the laser cavity. Experimentally, three linear laser schemes that feature repetition rates 94 MHz, 124 MHz and 133 MHz are systematically investigated. When the pump power is 1100 mW, the 124-MHz laser cavity delivers highly stable pulses with a single-pulse energy of 0.92 nJ. After the compression, the pulse duration obtained from the 124-MHz fiber laser is 250 fs, while the corresponding transform-limited pulse duration is 124 fs. The highest fundamental repetition rate that could be achieved in our experiment is 133 MHz, as mentioned above. The noise characterization has been performed with different cavity lengths and therefore different net-cavity dispersion. The 68-fs timing jitter and the 0.01% relative intensity noise (RIN) of the 133-MHz fiber laser have been realized integrated from 1 kHz to 10 MHz. Furthermore, the root-mean-square (RMS) power fluctuation is 0.35% in 2 hours, which implies superior stability of the output power. Thus, this linear fiber oscillator provides a competitive low-noise light source for optical applications appropriate for complex environments.
In recent years, mid-infrared fiber lasers based on gas-filled photonic crystal hollow-core fibers (HCFs) have attracted enormous attention. They provide a potential method for the generation of ...high-power mid-infrared emissions, particularly beyond 4 μm. However, there are high requirements of the pump for wavelength stability, tunability, laser linewidth, etc., due to the narrow absorption linewidth of gases. Here, we present the use of a narrow-linewidth, high-power fiber laser with a highly stable and precisely tunable wavelength at 2 μm for gas absorption. It was a master oscillator power-amplifier (MOPA) structure, consisting of a narrow-linewidth fiber seed and two stages of Thulium-doped fiber amplifiers (TDFAs). The seed wavelength was very stable and was precisely tuned from 1971.4 to 1971.8 nm by temperature. Both stages of the amplifiers were forward-pumping, and a maximum output power of 24.8 W was obtained, with a slope efficiency of about 50.5%. The measured laser linewidth was much narrower than the gas absorption linewidth and the wavelength stability was validated by HBr gas absorption in HCFs. If the seed is replaced, this MOPA laser can provide a versatile pump source for mid-infrared fiber gas lasers.
Nonlinear polarization evolution (NPE) is among the most advanced techniques for obtaining ultrashort pulses with excellent optical performance. However, it is challenging to design environmentally ...stable NPE fiber oscillators using only polarization-maintaining (PM) fibers. Here, we use the same PM fiber and non-reciprocal phase shifter to design two different devices, which are capable of acting as effective NPE saturable absorbers (SAs) in two all-PM linear cavity fiber lasers. These two laser setups differ in the position of the non-reciprocal phase shifter, the presence of which is crucial for the proposed fiber lasers to reduce their mode-locking thresholds and achieve high repetition rates above 100 MHz. The mode-locking principle and pulse evolution in the laser cavity are investigated theoretically. The first all-PM fiber oscillator emits sub-200 fs stretched pulses with low peak powers. The second oscillator, with a simpler architecture, directly delivers stretched pulses with high peak powers, the spectral bandwidth greater than 30 nm, and the pulse duration less than 90 fs. To the best of our knowledge, 79 fs achieved in this design is the shortest pulse duration provided by PM fiber lasers using NPE mode-lockers.
A self-started stable tunable mode-locked soliton fiber laser in a linear cavity structure composed by commercial passive elements is presented in this paper. It is based on the combination of an ...erbium-doped fiber as the active medium, and a saturated fiber Bragg grating (FBG) as a partial mirror of the cavity. The other side of the cavity consists of a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror acting also as the mode-locking device. The central wavelength of the FBG is selected by the application of axial strain giving rise to a tunable soliton over 8.6 nm on the C band with a variable spacing of 0.01 nm. The laser delivers 18.9 ps long pulses with a 0.14 nm bandwidth, an 8.2 MHz repetition rate, a pulse energy of 89 pJ, and a peak power of 4.71 W.
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