0000000000328696
AUTHOR
A. D. Guzman-chavez
Finely tunable laser based on a bulk silicon wafer for gas sensing applications
In this work a very simple continuously tunable laser based on an erbium ring cavity and a silicon wafer is presented. This laser can be tuned with very fine steps, which is a compulsory characteristic for gas sensing applications. Moreover the laser is free of mode hopping within a spectral range sufficiently wide to match one of the ro-vibrational lines of a target molecule. Here the proposed laser reached, at ∼1530 nm, a continuous tuning range of around 950 pm (>100 GHz) before mode hopping occurred, when a silicon wafer of 355 μm thickness was used. Additionally, the laser can be finely tuned with small tuning steps of <12 pm, achieving a resolution of 84.6 pm °C-1 and by using a therm…
Comparison of asymmetric and symmetric cavity configurations of erbium-doped fiber laser in active Q-switched regime
We present a comparative analysis of the dynamics of an actively Q-switched erbium-doped fiber laser assembled in two configurations of Fabry–Perot cavity, asymmetric and symmetric, specified by the location of an acousto-optic Q-switch modulator relative to the output couplers. In both configurations, the length of an active (Er3+-doped) fiber is chosen such that the laser does not spuriously emit at the moments when the modulator is blocked, which is important for the pulse-on-demand operation. We show experimentally that the symmetric cavity configuration permits enlarging of the active fiber length twice as compared to the asymmetric one, thereby increasing the energy and decreasing the…
Excited-state absorption in erbium-doped silica fiber with simultaneous excitation at 977 and 1531 nm
We report a study of the excited-state absorption (ESA) in erbium-doped silica fiber (EDF) pumped at 977 nm, when the fiber is simultaneously excited by signal radiation at 1531 nm. We show, both experimentally and theoretically, that ESA efficiency at 977 nm gets strongly enhanced only in the presence of signal power. Experimentally, this conclusion is supported through the detection of upconversion emission, a “fingerprint” of the ESA process, and through the measurements of the EDF nonlinear transmission coefficient for the pump wavelength, which is sensitive to the ESA value. It is shown that the experimental data are precisely modeled with an advanced five-level Er3+ model developed fo…