We have theoretically and experimentally investigated the dual-peak feature of tilted fiber gratings with excessively tilted structure (named as Ex-TFGs). We have explained the dual-peak feature by solving eigenvalue equations for TM_0m and TE_0m of a circular waveguide, in which the TE (transverse electric) and TM (transverse magnetic) core modes are coupled into TE and TM cladding modes, respectively. Meanwhile, in the experiment, we have verified that one of the dual peaks at the shorter wavelength is due to the TM mode coupling whereas the other one at the longer wavelength arises from TE mode coupling when a linearly polarized light launched into the Ex-TFG. We have also investigated the peak separation of TE and TM cladding mode for different surrounding medium refractive indexes (SRI), revealed that the dual peaks separation is decreasing as increasing of SRI, which agrees very well with the theoretical analysis results.

We demonstrate an all-fiber mode locked laser based on hybrid structure of multimode fiber saturable absorber (SA) that can realize both conventional soliton and stretched-pulse states. Stable 16.44 MHz conventional soliton pulses are achieved by injecting 80 mW threshold pump power. By increasing the incident pump power to 420 mW, the laser evolves from soliton operation into stretched-pulse mode locking state. 310 fs stretched-pulse are obtained with the same repetition rate as the soliton pulses. The center wavelength and its 3 dB spectrum bandwidth are 1603 nm and 14.2 nm, respectively. For the first time, we experimentally confirm transition between conventional soliton and stretched-pulse in 1.5 μm mode-locked fiber laser by introducing multimode optical fiber SA. Moreover, the maximum single pulse energy of nearly 1 nJ is achieved. Such all-fiber mode-locked lasers based on hybrid structure of multimode fiber are attractive for practical applications without damage and the limitation of life time.

In this paper, we have theoretically and experimentally investigated the unique vector refractive index (RI) sensing property of tilted fiber grating (TFG). Due to the orthogonal symmetric grating structure, TFGs would mainly achieve the coupling between the fiber core mode and the two orthogonal polarization LP1m of cladding mode. And the numerical simulation results showed that the coupling coefficient between fundamental core mode to the LP1m cladding mode is higher than the others. In the experiment, we have furthermore observed the cladding mode field distribution of excessively TFG (Ex-TFG) and long period fiber grating (LPFG), which indicated that the evanescent field distribution of cladding mode of TFG shows an asymmetric near field distribution with two lobes oriented along the fast axis of TFG, and the one of LPFG has a circularly symmetric cladding mode field distribution. In addition, by employing side-immersion method, we have measured the azimuth RI sensitivities of Ex-TFG, tilted fiber Bragg grating (TFBG) and LPFG, which exhibited that both Ex-TFG and TFBG have shown a direction-dependency RI sensitivity, and the RI sensitivity with side-immersion along fast axis is almost half of the one along slow axis, and the RI sensitivity of LPFG is azimuth independent. Overall, the experiment results show that the TFGs inherently show unique directional RI sensing property, which could be potentially applied in vector sensing area.

In this paper, we have numerically and experimentally investigated the radiation mode of 45° tilted fiber grating (45° TFG). By introducing the axial distributions into the volume current method, we have established a three-dimension theoretical model to analyze spatial distributions of the radiation mode of 45° TFG, and measured the radiation mode spatial distributions in experiment. Both numerical and experimental results show that the radiation mode of 45° TFG exhibits an exponential reduction along the fiber axial direction, and a quasi-Gaussian profile along the radial direction of fiber. Additionally, we have also measured the detailed polarization dependent azimuthal intensity distributions of radiation modes of both s- and p-polarized core modes. The degree of polarization (DOP) of radiation mode is around 99.886%, which is independent of the length and the polarization extinction ratio (PER) of the grating. Moreover, for the first time, we have experimentally observed a very weak p-polarized component existing in the radiation mode, which has matched well with the simulation results.

Ultrafast lasers, providing the shortest pulses worldwide, have been playing a vital role in the ultrafast imaging technology. The temporal resolution has been increasing rapidly in recent years but finally reaches its limit—the pulse width approaches photoperiods, causing significant broadening of spectral bandwidth. The state-of-the-art high harmonics generation based attosecond lasers, with pulse widths reaching ∼50 attoseconds, present octave-spanning spectra. This brings a major challenge to traditional imaging methods, as they result in unbearable chromatic aberrations. To address this challenge, we propose the neural-network approach for broadband imaging and demonstrate its effectiveness empirically by facilitating rapid coherent diffractive imaging under octave-spanning supercontinuum illumination. The proposed method remains effective when deployed with three-octave-spanning spectra, supporting both continuous and comb-like profiles as indicated by simulations. Such lensless imaging method, applicable to both extreme ultraviolet and soft x-ray sources, potentially provides an approach to attosecond imaging.

We experimentally investigate the noise properties of a homemade 586 MHz mode-locked laser (MLL). The variation of the timing jitter versus the harmonic order is measured, which is consistent with the theoretical analyses. The dominant contributions to the timing jitter are detailedly studied by analyzing the phase noises at different harmonic frequencies. For low-order harmonics, the intensity noise and relative-intensity-noise-coupled (RIN-coupled) jitter mainly contribute to the timing jitter, while for high-order harmonics, the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise makes the dominant contribution. Then we find that a higher output ratio has an obvious improvement on reducing the timing jitter and suppressing the phase noise because of the shorter pulse duration and lower net cavity dispersion caused by the higher output ratio. Finally a comparison of the noise performance between the MLL and a commercial signal generator is made, which shows that the optically generated radio-frequency signal (OGRFS) has a lower phase noise at high offset frequencies, however the higher phase noise at low offset frequencies leads to a higher timing jitter than the commercial SG.