All-fiber widely tunable mode-locked thulium-doped laser using a curvature multimode interference filter

摘要

We demonstrated a widely tunable mode-locked thulium doped fiber laser (TDFL) by using a homemade multimode interference filter (MMIF). The MMIF had a structure of single mode fiber (SMF)-multimode fiber (MMF)-SMF and three main transmission peaks at 1901.2, 1957.2 and 2043.2 nm. By mechanically bending the MMIF, the three main transmission peaks were tuned in the range of 1860-2024 nm due to multimode interference effect. By inserting the MMIF into a passively mode-locked TDFL cavity pumped by a 1570 nm fiber laser, a tunable mode-locked TDFL with a tuning range of 1919.6-2014.9 nm was achieved by adjusting the MMIF. To the best of our knowledge, such a tunable range is the largest among all-fiber tunable mode-locked TDFLs.