We demonstrate the stabilization of an optical frequency comb (OFC) using a segment of fiber delay line as a reference. A mode-locked Er-doped fiber laser is phase locked to a kilometer-long fiber delay line using three different schemes. The short-term stability of the comb modes in the OFC stabilized by these schemes is obviously enhanced, down to the 10-12 level at millisecond average time. Among these three schemes, phase locking two bunches of comb modes in the OFC to the same fiber delay line exhibits the lowest residual phase noise. Fiber-delay-line-referenced OFCs can provide reliable laser sources in precise metrology owing to the advances of low cost, compactness, and high integration.

We demonstrate a robust femtosecond LIDAR setup by using two free-running environmentally stable all-polarization-maintaining nonlinear amplified loop mirror mode-locked fiber lasers. Based on the asynchronous optical sampling method, a ranging accuracy of ±2 μm within 65 m has been achieved, as tested in an 80-m-long underground optical tunnel. Through the Kalman filter in real-time data processing, the measurement accuracy can be maintained at a 200 Hz update rate. This setup provides a practical tool for various large-scale industrial and astronomical ranging applications.

We demonstrate a coherent synthesis system based on femtosecond Yb-doped fiber laser technology. The output pulse of the amplification system is divided into two replicas and seeded into photonic crystal fibers of two parallel branches for nonlinear pulse compression. Because of the different nonlinear dynamics in the photonic crystal fibers, the compressed pulses show different spectra, which can be spliced to form a broad coherent spectrum. The integrated timing jitter between the pulses of two branches is less than one tenth of an optical cycle. By coherently synthesizing pulses from these two branches, 8 fs few-cycle pulses are produced.