Optical modulation of microfibers and application to ultrafast fiber lasers

Abstract

Microfibers with different waist diameters were prepared successfully by a flame-brushing technique. Their saturable absorption properties were investigated. The non-saturable loss and modulation depth both decreased with the increase of the diameter. According to the mode distribution of microfibers with a waist diameter of 25 mm, it could be supposed that the evanescent field effect may be useful for microfibers being saturable absorbers (SAs). Based on the 25 mm-diameter microfiber, an all-fiberstructure mode-locked fiber laser was achieved successfully with long term stability in the span of a week. The results indicated that microfibers with suitable diameters were excellent SAs. To the best of our knowledge, this is first report on the usage of microfibers as a SA for building ultrafast fiber lasers.

Fibre tapering using plasmonic microheaters and deformation-induced pull

“…Optical micro and nanofibres (MNFs) have extensive applications in nonlinearity generation [1,2,3,4,5], near-field optics [6,7,8,9], quantum optics [10,11,12,13], and miniaturized sensing [14,15,16,17,18,19]. Although MNFs have fostered the development of various disciplines, their own study was barely considered until the convenient fabrication of low-loss MNFs was made possible.…”