Microfiber-Knot-Resonator-Induced Partial Elimination of Longitudinal Modes in Fiber Lasers for In-Tune-Switchable Nanosecond Pulse Generation

Abstract

By incorporating a house-made microfiber knot resonator (MKR), mode-locking regime transformation in an erbium-doped fiber (EDF) laser was achieved. With typical nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) as the mode-locker, ∼890 fs soliton pulses could be directly produced from the EDF laser. However, once the MKR was further incorporated in it, the emitted pulse duration fell into the nanosecond regime, and meanwhile the spectral bandwidth dramatically narrowed down around 0.05 nm. This resulted from that the longitudinal laser modes were greatly eliminated by the MKR. The MKR exhibits tightly-packed, extremely narrow transmission teeth, acting as a comb-like, sharp-rolloff bandpass filter. The mode elimination factor could reach ∼98.81%. Further manipulating the intra-cavity polarization state, the emission wavelength could be switchable from one of the transmission teeth of the MKR to another, due to the intrinsic polarization-sensitivity of the NPR. Our results demonstrated that MKR could be a useful device in fiber lasers to enable some artificially pre-defined spectral and temporal characteristics through pre-designing on the related parameters of the MKR. This could also provide a route to transform the temporal characteristics through tailoring the spectral profile, i.e., manipulating the permitted longitudinal laser modes, in fiber lasers.