Passively Q-Switched and Mode-Locked Er3+-Doped Ring Fiber Laser with Pulse Width of Hundreds of Picoseconds

Abstract

Greatly improving the energy of a single mode-locked pulse while ensuring the acquisition of the width of short pulses will contribute to the application of mode-locked pulse in basic research, such as precision machining. This report has investigated a Q-switched and mode-locked (QML) erbium doped ring fiber laser based on the nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) technology and a mechanical Q-switched device. Without the working of the mechanical Q-switched device, the fiber laser exported the continuous-wave mode-locked (CWML) pulse, with a width of 212.5 ps, and a repetition frequency of 81.97 MHz. For the CWML operation, the maximum output average power is 25.7 mW, and the energy is only 0.31 nJ. For the QML operation, 18.03 mW average power is achieved at the Q-switching frequency of 100 Hz. The energy of the QML pulse is increased by over 1100 times to 360.6 nJ. The width of the QML pulse is 203.1 ps measured by an autocorrelation curve, with the time-band product (TBP) being 0.598. The power instability is 0.5% (RMS) and 0.7% (RMS), respectively, for CWML and QML operation within 120 min. Furthermore, the spectral signal-to-noise ratio is about 60 dB. For the QML operation, the power instability is 0.48% (RMS) within 60 s and 0.37% (RMS) within 10 s. After frequency stabilization, the frequency fluctuation is ±100 Hz in the long-term of 1200 s, with the frequency stability (FS) calculated to be 2.44 × 10−6. It indicates that the QML fiber laser has good power stability and frequency stability.