A long-cavity, passively mode-locked erbium fiber laser operated in the square-pulse regime is demonstrated as a useful light source for interrogating fiber Bragg grating arrays. Output pulses with 4-W peak-power, 10-ns pulse widths, and bandwidths greater than 60nm were used successfully to interrogate 2% fiber Bragg gratings.
Rare-earth dopants in optical fibers have in general been ignored as a source of dispersion. The host material dispersion has been assumed to be an adequate description of the dispersion properties. Resonant dispersion features owing to absorption by the rare-earth ions were observed that were comparable in magnitude with the host material dispersion. These observations have consequences in the design of fiber lasers, nonlinear fiber transmission systems, and analog information systems.
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