Tunable dual -wavelength operation of a soliton fiber laser

Abstract

We show theoretically that the pulse instability in the figure-8 laser can be removed by introducing intentional twist in the fibre, which provides a controllable birefringence-induced phase-bias. In the later section, we verify the proposed theory experimentally. We also show that such a stabilized laser can generate very stable dual wavelength pulses with the wavelengths tunable by simply adjusting the polarization controllers in the two loops. Wavelength tuning in single wavelength operation and wavelength separation and relative amplitude tuning are demonstrated in dual wavelength operation. Furthermore, the polarization of the pulses at each wavelength is orthogonal to the other.