Highly Efficient O-Band Rectangular Pulse Emission in a Figure-of-Nine Bismuth-Doped Fiber Laser

Abstract

Highly efficient rectangular pulse emission is significant in high energy O-band applications due to the zero dispersion of standard telecom optical fiber in the second telecommunication window. The rectangular pulse emission offers the peak power clamping, which avoids wave-breaking and maintains the fundamental repetition frequency with arbitrarily widened temporal pulse width of ultrafast laser at high pump powers. The current technology in the O-band rectangular pulse emission achieves the maximum pulse energy of ∼30 nJ with an efficiency of ∼1.06%. Here, we fabricated a single-mode bismuth-doped phosphosilicate optical fiber by the modified chemical vapour deposition technique. The Bi-doped phosphosilicate optical fiber was characterized by a peak absorption of ∼0.6 dB/m at 1250 nm and a high gain coefficient of ∼0.22 dB/m at 1320 nm. These parameters contribute to the generation of rectangular pulse with a pump power threshold of ∼227.7 mW in a figure-of-nine laser cavity. The maximum pulse energy was achieved as ∼197.7 nJ, whereas the laser efficiency is ∼14.3%. We presented an O-band rectangular pulse emission with the highest pulse energy and efficiency as compared to previous studies, whilst its all-fiber laser setup is robust and feasible for high pulse energy applications.