Ultrashort pulse fiber lasers and their applications

Abstract

Fiber lasers, which consist of ideal waveguides of optical fibers, work as stable, practical, and maintenance-free lasers. A passively mode-locked ultrashort pulse fiber laser using the intensity-dependent absorption element has made great progress using a new type of saturable absorber with a nanocarbon material. The techniques of ultrashort pulse amplification and pulse compression were also developed. Using a combination of specialty fibers, ultrawideband pulse sources, such as wavelength tunable ultrashort pulses and supercontinuum, can be demonstrated. These new light sources are useful for laser applications, especially for optical metrology. In this paper, the progress of highly functional ultrashort pulse fiber laser sources and their applications are reviewed mainly on the basis of the works of this author.

Bismuth‐doped fiber as Q‐switcher in hafnium bismuth erbium co‐doped fiber laser

“…Compared to the conventional lasers based on bulk systems, they are better in terms of robustness, simplicity, excellent heat dissipating characteristic, reliability, and zero maintenance. 1,2 Q-switched fiber lasers have attracted much interest in recent years. They can provide a relatively high energy pulses, which are desirable in variety of applications such as micromachining holography, dentistry, and drilling.…”

Octave-spanning supercontinuum generation in highly nonlinear silica fibres based on cost-effective fibre amplifiers

“…On the other hand, SCG in optical fibres is currently an active field of research due to the numerous applications such as optical coherence tomography, microscopy techniques, spectroscopic analysis of air and water pollutants, optical communications or optical metrology in which supercontinuum sources are needed [15][16][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32].…”

Midinfrared optical frequency comb based on difference frequency generation using high repetition rate Er-doped fiber laser with single wall carbon nanotube film

“…It is also easy to fabricate a transmission type device, which is useful for ultrashort pulse fiber lasers. Using the combination of highly nonlinear fiber, we can generate wideband supercontinuum (SC), which works as a broadband coherent laser source [16,17].…”