Recent Progress and Development Trend of Self-Sweeping Fiber Laser

Zhenzhong Zuo,Jintao Bai,Haowei Chen,Baole Lu,Kaile Wang

doi:10.3389/fphy.2021.809049

Abstract

Since 2011, when Kir’yanov et al. first reported a new wavelength self-sweeping ytterbium-doped fiber laser that does not rely on any tuning element but only on the dynamic induced grating generated in the gain fiber by the standing wave resonator structure, the self-sweeping effect based on fiber waveguides has been extensively studied, leading to great progress in fundamental physics and other applications of self-sweeping fiber lasers. Different doped fiber lasers have not only achieved the self-sweeping effect, but also observed new phenomena such as anomalous self-sweeping and continuous pulses. Due to their remarkable spectral and pulsed characteristics, self-sweeping fiber lasers have been widely used in spectral detection, fiber sensing and short pulse synthesis. In this paper, we will introduce the classification of different doped self-sweeping fiber lasers, summarize their different implementations, and introduce their self-sweeping laws, pulse characteristics, recent progress of applications and future development prospects.

Highlights

Tunable fiber lasers are valuable for optical communication, optical sensing, and spectral synthesis due to their flexible wavelength tuning properties [1,2,3,4,5]
The currently reported self-sweeping fiber lasers are capable of generating autonomous wavelength tuning in different spectral ranges between 1 and 2.1 μm, and related application studies are conducted in spectral detection and analysis, and optical sensing applications
In the application of self-sweeping fiber laser, firstly, the laser needs to be packaged and miniaturized for practical application, and secondly, considering that the selfsweeping fiber laser is influenced by the environment and resonator loss, the temperature and resonator loss control module needs to be added to stabilize the self-scanning range, and the spectral selection device needs to be added to reduce the boundary fluctuation of the scanning area, and the self-sweeping range needs to be artificially regulated

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Tunable fiber lasers are valuable for optical communication, optical sensing, and spectral synthesis due to their flexible wavelength tuning properties [1,2,3,4,5]. Self-sweeping ranges up to 45 nm have been obtained in ytterbium-doped fiber lasers by temperature-controlled Lyot filters; single-frequency selfsweeping fiber lasers have been achieved by limiting the intracavity longitudinal mode number by adjusting the resonator length; and normal as well as reverse self-sweeping effects have been defined according to the wavelength shift direction in hybrid self-sweeping fiber lasers. Later, both bidirectional and unidirectional fiber ring resonator structures were used to realize self-sweeping fiber lasers, while the timedomain dynamics evolved from the pulsed state to the continuous wave state. —— 0.5–16 —— 0.3–6.6 0.5–1.7 0.158–0.13 0.0018–0.0002 0.19–0.43 0.145–0.284 ∼2.85 ∼1.48 0.05 (mimimum) ——

SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT