Abstract

Fiber lasers with fiber-Bragg gratings (FBGs) inscribed directly into the active fiber improve the laser lifetime as the laser resonator is fully integrated and there are no splices between the two FBGs which could generate a failure [1]. Such monolithic fiber lasers can find variety of applications, e.g., in high-power sources, narrow-bandwidth short-cavity sources for spectral-beam combining, compact laser arrays for photonics component characterization and optical fiber sensors. In this paper, we present monolithic thulium-doped fiber laser (TDFL) emitting in the region around 2 μm. To our knowledge, this is the first rare-earth-doped fiber laser with a FBG pair written with deep UV femtosecond laser radiation.

© 2013 IEEE