High repetition rate gain-switched 194 μm fiber laser pumped by 156 μm dissipative soliton resonance fiber laser

Abstract

A dissipative soliton resonance (DSR) mode-locked Er:Yb fiber laser has been used to pump a thulium fiber laser to generate gain-switched pulses at high repetition rates. Here 412ns long DSR pulses with a center wavelength of around 1.56μm at a repetition rate of 410kHz have been fed to a thulium fiber laser, resulting in generation of gain-switched pulses at 1.94μm. The minimum pulse width achieved was 256ns with an average power of 4.6W at 66% slope efficiency. Gain-switched pulses at 520kHz and 750kHz were generated through changing the pump pulse repetition rate by modifying the DSR cavity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a high repetition rate gain-switched thulium fiber laser pumped by a DSR mode-locked fiber laser. As DSR pulses can be generated with high seed average power and energy independent of the operating wavelength regime as well as mode-locking technique, the proposed method can be applied to generate gain-switched pulses at high repetition rates and various wavelengths without the need of any optical or electrical modulators.