Broadband thulium-doped fiber ASE source.

We report on a flat and broadband thulium-doped amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) fiber source working around 1.85 µm in the eye-safe spectral region. Core-pumped thulium fibers were prepared in-house using the modified chemical vapor deposition method. The amplified spontaneous emission source in a backward direction with respect to the pump and in a single-ended configuration produces stable, non-polarized radiation with an output power of up to 280 mW, corresponding to a slope efficiency of about 36% with respect to the pump power. To the best of our knowledge, the device reported herein is the broadest ASE source based on Tm-doped fiber without internal spectral filtering with an output power exceeding 90 mW and full width at half-maximum of the spectrum greater than 155 nm.

Broadly tunable laser based on novel metallic resonant leaky-mode diffraction grating.

We present a fibre laser broadly tunable in a wavelength range from 1058 nm to 1640 nm based on a new type of metallic resonant leaky-mode diffraction grating and three fibre-pigtailed semiconductor optical amplifiers. For TM polarization in Littrow configuration, the grating has experimentally measured diffraction efficiency into the -1st reflected order of more than 90 % over a spectral range of 1417 nm to 1700 nm. The laser covered a spectral range of 331 nm within a tuning band of 558 nm without any adjustment of optics and its tuning range was limited by amplification bands of available semiconductor optical amplifiers.

Reflectivity of transient Bragg reflection gratings in fiber laser with laser-wavelength self-sweeping: erratum.

This erratum presents a correction to the computed reflection spectra of transient fiber Bragg gratings that are spontaneously built-up in the ytterbium-doped fiber of the fiber laser with laser wavelength self-sweeping. The corrected spectra have high reflectivity reaching values up to 100%. Therefore, they still more support the conclusion drawn in the original paper that self-sweeping is an important mechanism for triggering the self-Q-switched regime with giant pulse generation.

Reflectivity of transient Bragg reflection gratings in fiber laser with laser-wavelength self-sweeping.

We present a method for the estimation of the reflection spectra of transient gratings in rare-earth doped fiber lasers having a self-sweeping of laser wavelength. We show that high reflectivities of several tens of percent can be achieved. An example of this is demonstrated through the use of an experimental Yb-doped Fabry-Perot fiber laser. The gratings' spectra are highly asymmetric due to the apodization of the refractive index modulation. The importance of the self-sweeping regime for triggering self-Q-switched laser instabilities is discussed.

Effects of polarization dependent gain and dynamic birefringence of the SOA on the performance of the ultrafast nonlinear interferometer gate.

The model of ultrafast nonlinear interferometer gate accounting for the polarization dependent gain and dynamic birefringence has been developed. It is shown that these effects can lead to appearance of the satellite pulses and limit the achievable extinction ratio. The effect of dynamic birefringence can be completely eliminated by proper adjustment of SOA axes but it can strongly impair the performance of the gate when the axes are misaligned. The switching window should not be set to half of a bit-period to avoid interference of the satellites of neighbor pulses.

Measurement of pulse amplitude and phase using cross-phase modulation in microstructure fiber.

Cross-phase modulation in a highly nonlinear microstructure optical fiber with low dispersion and high birefringence is used for the measurement of the pulse amplitude and phase of picosecond pulses by frequency-resolved optical gating. An alignment-free configuration including an optical amplifier is proposed and experimentally tested. The simulated annealing method is used for retrieving the amplitude and phase from cross-phase modulation spectrograms. It takes into account the birefringence of the measurement fiber and the resolution of the optical spectrum analyzer.

Modulational-instability sigma-resonator fiber laser.

A modulational-instability laser with a resonator in a sigma configuration has been developed. The importance of a suitable intracavity filter for removing the autocorrelation background of the output signal is shown. A pulse train with a repetition rate of 107 GHz determined by the Fabry-Perot etalon used in the resonator was obtained at 1.56mum .