All-Polarization-Maintaining, Ultra-Compact Tm-Doped Fiber Laser Designed for Mid-Infrared Comb

Abstract

Developing compact and stable 2 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ultrafast laser sources is important for generating mid-inferred frequency combs. Here, we report on a simple, compact and reliable thulium-doped fiber laser based on figure-of-9 mode-locking. Self-starting and stable mode-locked operation is achieved with 0.30 nJ pulse energy and 128 fs pulse width under 121.3 MHz repetition rate. The generated pulses centered at 1990 nm have a 3 dB bandwidth of 39.4 nm. The laser has been assembled into a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$197\times 78\times 20$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> fiber box under temperature-control. The repetition rate was phase locked over 20 h with a fluctuation standard deviation of 192.5 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula> Hz. Such compact and highly-reliable mid-inferred laser could be used beyond laboratory and promote numerous critical applications including dual-comb spectroscopy, ranging and frequency calibration.