This paper presents a tunable, switchable multi-wavelength emission from an erbium-doped fiber ring laser, enabled by adjusting the spectral fringe visibility of a fiber interferometer filter. The filter is formed with specially designed concatenated tapered fibers to configure a Mach-Zehnder fiber interferometer (MZFI). The laser emission is highly flexible and reconfigurable, allowing for tuning between single- and dual-wavelength operation. The laser can switch sequentially from one up to six wavelengths by fixing the curvature and adjusting the polarization state. The lasing emission is generated over a stable wavelength range between 1559.59 nm and 1563.54 nm, exhibiting an optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) exceeding ~35 dB. The performance of amplitude and wavelength fluctuations were evaluated, indicating an appropriate stability of ~3 dB and a shift less than 0.1 nm within a 45 min period at room temperature. A detailed comparison with the literature is given.

An experimental demonstration for generating harmonics in the optical Vernier effect (OVE) by cascading tapered single-mode fibres (SMF28) is presented. The tapered optical fibres conformed to a pair of in-series Mach-Zehnder fibre interferometers (MZFI), in which one MZFI was a reference while the other was a sensor. The first-order harmonic was achieved by increasing the distance between tapers of the sensor MZFI by a multiple of (i + 1) times the distance between tapers of the reference MZFI plus a mismatch factor. A series of experiments using an individual MZFI and two MZFIs with traditional and harmonic OVE as displacement sensors were performed to compare their sensitivities and magnification factors and demonstrate the improving the sensitivity. The displacement sensor with the first-order harmonic exhibited a maximum sensitivity of −33.3 nm/mm with an M-factor of 8.53 in the mm range.

A fiber optic curvature sensor based on a tapered single-mode optical fiber coated with a polyester polymer (T-SMF-CPP) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Fabrication of the tapered optical fibers was realized by heating and stretching by a flame, and an airbrush was used to coat the surface of the tapered fiber with the polymer. The operating principle of the sensor was based on the interaction of the evanescent wave with the polyester polymer deposited on the tapered fiber. By adopting intensity demodulation in experiments, average sensitivities of -5.017 dB/m-1 and 5.862 dB/m-1 in the curvature ranges from 1.23 to 4.44 m-1 and from 4.64 to 7.54 m-1, respectively, were obtained for a fixed wavelength of $\lambda =1572.45$ nm. The curvature of the sensor did not show a temperature dependence in the range [24-90 °C].

In this work, we report a new method to make a selection between tunable and multi-wavelength switchable operation in an erbium-doped fiber laser. The selective lasing performance is based on two concatenated comb-filters built on tapered optical fibers. By properly adjusting curvature applied to the comb-filters, the lasing wavelength can be selective in two ways: continuous tuning or generating multi-wavelength laser oscillation. The laser exhibits an optical signal to noise ratio of ~30 dB and power stability below 1 dB at room temperature. The main achievement of this proposal is that the laser can be operating independently between tuning and multi-wavelength lasing with a high stability employing a reliable and low-cost comb filters.

A multiwavelength Q-switched erbium-doped fiber ring laser based on a section of Tm-Ho codoped fiber as a saturable absorber, assisted by a tapered optical fiber filter to stabilize the lasing performance is reported. The tapered fiber structure acts as a comb filter that allows us simultaneous lasing wavelengths at 1529.69, 1531.74, and 1533.48 nm with high stability. By adjusting the pump power, optical pulses with repetition rates from 10.46 to 61.8 kHz were obtained. The maximum average output power was 27.61 mW, while 496.34 nJ for the maximum pulse energy. The fiber laser exhibits a power deviation of ± 0.376 dB, an OSNR of 54 dB, and a spectral width of lasing lines of 0.06 nm, with stable multiwavelength lasing.