Stable and widely tunable wavelength-spacing single longitudinal mode dual-wavelength erbium-doped fiber laser

In this paper, a novel and simple widely tunable wavelength-spacing single longitudinal mode (SLM) dual-wavelength erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) based on the tunable filter group, a passive feedback fiber ring (FFR) and saturable absorber (SA), is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. Experiment results show that the wavelength spacing can tune from 0.8 nm up to 17 nm, which has potential to generate terahertz (THz) waves by photo-mixing the lasing wavelengths in a high-speed photo-detector, and the maximum fluctuation of peak power of EDFL is less than 0.37 dB within 75 min and the optical signal-to-noise ratio is more than 30 dB at room temperature. In the absence of high-speed photo-detector, THz beat-note is also successively observed with the help of an autocorrelator. Moreover, dual-wavelength fiber laser can selectively realize one wavelength lasing by simply tuning filters. (c) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.