Widely Tunable Single Longitudinal Mode Fiber Laser With Cascaded Fiber-Ring Secondary Cavity

A widely tunable single longitudinal mode (SLM) fiber laser with cascaded Type I and Type II fiber ring secondary cavities, which uses a tunable fiber Bragg grating (FBG) as the mode-restricting and wavelength-tuning element, is proposed and demonstrated. Since the cascaded fiber rings can effectively expand the pass-band spacing to make the mode selection with the FBG easier, the stability of SLM oscillation can be improved by suitably optimizing the coupling ratio of optical couplers in Type II fiber ring to ensure that at least one and only one longitudinal mode dominates in the selected pass-band. When the fiber ring lengths are designed to make their expanded pass-band spacing be a value from 0.5 to 1 times of the 3-dB bandwidth of the FBG, the mode competitions between both neighboring pass-bands and main cavity modes, may be effectively eliminated, making the laser maintain mode-hop-free SLM oscillations while it is widely tuned.