Chinese Optics Letters, 2018, 16 (2): 020020, Published Online: Jul. 16, 2018
2 μm mode-locking laser performances of sol-gel-fabricated large-core Tm-doped silica fiber
Abstract
High-power ultrafast fiber lasers operating at the 2 μm wavelength are extremely desirable for material processing, laser surgery, and nonlinear optics. Here we fabricated large-core (LC) double-cladding Tm-doped silica fiber via the sol-gel method. The sol-gel-fabricated Tm-doped silica (SGTS) fiber had a large core diameter of 30 μm with a high refractive index homogeneity (Δ n = 2 × 10 4 ). With the newly developed LC SGTS fiber as the gain fiber, high-power mode-locking was realized. By using a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) as a mode locker, the LC SGTS fiber oscillator generated mode-locked pulses with an average output power as high as 1.0 W and a pulse duration of 23.9 ps at the wavelength of 1955.0 nm. Our research results show that the self-developed LC Tm-doped silica fiber via the sol-gel method is a promising gain fiber for generating high-power ultrafast lasers in the 2 μm spectral region.
Yan Ren, Zhipeng Qin, Guoqiang Xie, Zhen Qiao, Ting Hai, Peng Yuan, Jingui Ma, Liejia Qian, Shikai Wang, Chunlei Yu, Lili Hu. 2 μm mode-locking laser performances of sol-gel-fabricated large-core Tm-doped silica fiber[J]. Chinese Optics Letters, 2018, 16(2): 020020.