Stable multi-wavelength erbium-doped fiber laser based on a photonic crystal fiber Sagnac loop filter

Abstract

A multi-wavelength erbium-doped fiber laser based on a Sagnac loop filter which is formed by a birefringent and highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (PCF), a 3-dB optical coupler and two polarization controllers is proposed. The PCF Sagnac loop filter is used as a comb filter and power-stabilizing and -equilibrizing component in the multi-wavelength erbiumdoped fiber laser. Stable multi-wavelength lasing at room temperature is achieved, owing to the contributions of both the birefringent property and the four-wave mixing effect of the PCF.Output power, dBm

Multi-Wavelength Fiber Optical Parametric Oscillator Based on a Highly Nonlinear Fiber and a Sagnac Loop Filter

“…However, the FOPA exhibits the inhomogenous line broadening at room temperature and the crosssaturation gain appears markedly only when the signal power is comparable with the pump power. In addition, the FWM effect in the ring cavity of the MW-FOPO provides self-stability of multiwavelength lasing, which has been well demonstrated in some MWEDFLs [25][26][27]. The power stability of the porposed MW-FOPO is also demonstrated in our experiment.…”

“…Fiber lasers are one kind of the most important lasers, which also include multi-wavelength fiber lasers (MWFLs) with a huge potential in applications such as WDM optical communication systems, optical fiber sensors, optical component testing, microwave photonics and spectroscopy [20][21][22][23]. A great variety of MWFLs have been well developed based on various optical amplifiers including Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) [24][25][26][27][28][29], fiber Raman amplifiers (FRAs) [30][31][32][33], fiber Brillouin amplifiers (FBAs) [34][35][36] and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) [37][38][39][40] in the past several years. Thereinto, multi-wavelength Erbium-doped fiber lasers (MW-EDFLs) have been widely investigated due to their advantages such as low cost, low threshold, high power conversion efficiency and compatibility with the optical fiber communication system.…”

“…Thereinto, multi-wavelength Erbium-doped fiber lasers (MW-EDFLs) have been widely investigated due to their advantages such as low cost, low threshold, high power conversion efficiency and compatibility with the optical fiber communication system. However, special approaches such as using the four wave mixing (WFM) effect of special fibers [25][26][27], the hybrid gain [28], or the frequency-shifted feedback technique [29] should be employed to achieve stable multi-wavelength lasing since MW-EDFLs are not stable at room temperature due to the strong homogenous line broadening and cross-saturation gain of the Erbiumdoped fiber (EDF) [41]. The multi-wavelength Raman fiber laser has not been considered as a promising MWFL due to the limited gain bandwidth of the FRA.…”

Hydrostatic Pressure Sensor Based on a Gold-Coated Fiber Modal Interferometer Using Lateral Offset Splicing of Single Mode Fiber

“…Hydrostatic pressure sensors based on birefringent fibers are not compact since they usually need non-fiber components to detect the pressure-induced phase or use the fiber Sagnac interferometer with a relatively long sensing fiber. PCFs [28][29][30][31][32] are the great success in the history of optical fibers, which have achieved excellent properties in birefringence [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], dispersion [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51], single polarization single mode [52][53][54], nonlinearity [55], and effective mode area [56][57][58], and also excellent performances in the applications of fiber lasers [59][60][61] and nonlinear optics [62][63][64][65] over the past several years. PCFs have also further improved optical fiber sensors and have been used for strain sensing [66], gas sensing [67], biochemical sensing [68], refractive index sensing [69] and temperature sensing [70].…”

Bending Analysis of a Dual-Core Photonic Crystal Fiber

“…It is well known that PCFs have shown excellent performances in applications such as optical communications [36][37][38], fiber lasers [39][40][41][42], supercontinuum sources [43][44][45][46] and also fiber sensors [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56]. Fiber sensors based on PCFs have shown numerous advantages such as temperature insensitivity for strain sensing [49,50], high sensitivity for gas sensing [51], biochemical sensing [52], refractive index sensing [53] and pressure sensing [54,55], and the flexibility to form fiber sensors based on all-fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometers [56], which are mainly due to the remarkable flexibility in the fiber structure design of the PCF compared with the conventional optical fiber.…”