Widely tunable ultra-narrow-linewidth dissipative soliton generation at the telecom band

Abstract

Ultra-narrow-linewidth mode-locked lasers with wide wavelength tunability can be versatile light sources for a variety of newly emergent applications. However, it is very challenging to achieve the stable mode locking of substantially long, anomalously dispersive fiber laser cavities employing a narrowband spectral filter at the telecom band. Here, we show that a nearly dispersion-insensitive dissipative mode-locking regime can be accessed through a subtle counterbalance among significantly narrowband spectral filtering, sufficiently deep saturable absorption, and moderately strong in-fiber Kerr nonlinearity. This achieves ultra-narrow-linewidth (a few gigahertz) nearly transform-limited self-starting stable dissipative soliton generation at low repetition rates (a few megahertz) without cavity dispersion management over a broad tuning range of wavelengths covering the entire telecom C-band. This unique laser may have immediate application as an idealized pump source for high-efficiency nonlinear frequency conversion and nonclassical light generation in dispersion-engineered tightly light-confining microphotonic/nanophotonic systems.