Abstract
A wavelength-swept thulium-doped silica fiber laser using an intracavity rotating slotted-disk wavelength scanning filter in combination with an intracavity solid etalon for passive control of temporal and spectral profiles is reported. The laser yielded a wavelength swept output in a step-wise fashion with each laser pulse separated from the previous pulse by a frequency interval equal to the free-spectral-range of the etalon and with an instantaneous linewidth of <0.05 nm. Scanning ranges from 1905 nm to 2049 nm for a cladding-pumping laser configuration, and from 1768 nm to 1956 nm for a core-pumping laser configuration were achieved at average output powers up to ~1 W.
Highlights
Wavelength-swept lasers (WS-lasers) have important applications in a number of areas, including spectroscopic characterization of materials and swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) [1]
semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) operating in the twomicron wavelength band can be achieved through the use of an appropriate quantum well structure, but the performance specifications achieved to date are rather limited
The measured temporal profile shows pulsing behavior with poor amplitude and timing stability. This impacts directly on the spectral profile with the result that the evolution of the lasing wavelength with time during a scan is not smooth. This behavior is quite different from that routinely observed in WS-lasers based on SOA gain media [8, 12], and can be attributed to the long upper-state lifetime and low emission cross-section for rare-earth doped gain media leading to a long build-up time for laser emission
Summary
Wavelength-swept lasers (WS-lasers) have important applications in a number of areas, including spectroscopic characterization of materials and swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) [1]. Several kinds of wavelength sweeping arrangements (e.g. a diffraction grating with a rotating polygon mirror or a galvo scanned mirror [3,4,6], a fiber Fabry-Perot Tunable Filter (FFP-TF) [5], an Acousto-Optic tunable filter (AOTF) [7]) have been investigated. A wavelength-swept Tm fiber laser based on a FFP-TF with a scanning range from 1840 nm to 2040 nm and a maximum output power at the center of the tuning range of ~80 mW was reported [9]. We describe a wavelength-swept Tm-doped silica fiber laser operating in the two-micron band that employs a novel external feedback cavity design comprising a diffraction grating, a rotating slotted disk and an intracavity tilted etalon. A maximum output power up to 1.05 W for the scan repetition rates of 400 Hz was obtained for the cladding-pumped WS-laser
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