Tunable and Switchable Erbium-Doped Fiber Laser Using a Multimode-Fiber Based Filter

• Main Authors: Anum Khattak, Gerard Tatel, Li Wei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-07-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: fiber laser; laser tuning; switchable; tunable optical filter
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/8/7/1135

We demonstrated a compact tunable and switchable single/dual-wavelength erbium-doped fiber laser. The fiber laser can be tuned and switched from single-wavelength to dual-wavelength oscillation by using our recently proposed tunable comb filter. The comb filter consists of a section of multimode fiber (MMF) coiled into a polarization controller and two sections of single mode fibers (SMFs) to form a SMF/MMF/SMF structure, serving as a simple tunable all-fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Due to the insertion of the MMF-based polarization controller (PC), an additional phase shift is introduced from the difference of the birefringence intensity in different dominant modes, which can be used to tune the fiber laser. In the experiment, by properly adjusting the PC, a tuning range of 9.3 nm can be achieved for the single-wavelength operation. Moreover, dual-wavelength operation with different free-spectral-ranges can be obtained. The tunable and switchable fiber lasers are of great importance for their applications in optical testing, optical fiber sensing, and signal processing.