Spatiotemporal mode-locking in multimode fiber lasers

Abstract

A laser is based on the electromagnetic modes of its resonator, which provides the feedback required for oscillation. Enormous progress has been made toward controlling the interactions of longitudinal modes in lasers with a single transverse mode. For example, the field of ultrafast science has been built on lasers that lock many longitudinal modes together to form ultrashort light pulses. However, coherent superposition of longitudinal and transverse modes in a laser has received little attention. We show that modal and chromatic dispersions in fiber lasers can be counteracted by strong spatial and spectral filtering. This allows locking of multiple transverse and longitudinal modes to create ultrashort pulses with a variety of spatiotemporal profiles. Multimode fiber lasers thus open new directions in studies of nonlinear wave propagation and capabilities for applications.

2D Layered Materials: Synthesis, Nonlinear Optical Properties, and Device Applications

“…Fiber laser is a very important kind of laser, which has attracted much attention because of its miniaturization, compact structure, no adjustment, and high reliability. In terms of performance, its ultrashort pulse‐width and ultrahigh peak power operation have always been the goal of researchers in the field of laser . In order to obtain these pulses, two pulse‐shaping mechanisms—mode‐locking and Q‐switching—are mostly used.…”

Revealing the Buildup Dynamics of Harmonic Mode‐Locking States in Ultrafast Lasers

“…Ultrafast lasers with high repetition rate have many potential applications in multiple areas such as optical telecommunications, frequency metrology, high‐speed optical sampling, and data storage . Usually, fiber lasers have a fundamental repetition rate of tens to hundreds of MHz due to the difficulty of shortening the laser cavity .…”

Multimode Nonlinear Fiber Optics: Massively Parallel Numerical Solver, Tutorial, and Outlook

“…2) Gain, amplifiers, and lasers Very recently, several works have shown the potential for multimode propagation in fiber amplifiers and lasers to generate unprecedented high power, and even spatially-or spatiotemporally-engineered light [31], [32], [110]. Before this, multimode fibers were considered as a means of implementing a fiber-format saturable absorber (e.g., [111]- [114]).…”