Abstract

Bismuth (Bi)-doped fiber (BDF) lasers and amplifiers have been demonstrated in different glass hosts (i.e., aluminosilicate, phosphosilicate and germanosilicate) covering the 1150-1800nm wavelength region [1-3]. Pulsed Bi-doped fiber lasers (BDFLs) are of great interest owing to their potential applications in medicine, material processing and optical fiber communications. The first Bi-doped pulsed fiber laser was demonstrated in 2007 with 50ps pulses at 1161nm in a Bi-doped silicate fiber using SESAM as a saturable absorber (SA) [4]. A number of studies have since reported on BDFLs [3-6], however, the pulse dynamics in BDFs have not been fully understood due to the unsaturable loss and excited state absorption present in these fibers [7]. In this paper, we present an all fiber self-mode-locked BDFL operating at 1340nm with a minimum pulse width of 1.5ns, the first demonstration of its kind.

© 2017 IEEE