We design, fabricate, and demonstrate the first hollow-core air-gap anti-resonant fiber coupler in a dual hollow-core anti-resonant fiber (DHAF) structure. The coupling takes place through an air gap between air cores, promising a limitless operation window beyond material transmission. The DHAF follows the same waveguide mechanism as the hollow-core anti-resonant fiber (HAF). The coupling is attainable over the entire transmission bands determined by a resonant frequency of a HAF. A coupling length, thus coupling strength, is controllable by adjusting fiber design parameters. In addition, at a fixed design and length, the coupling strength linearly responds to longitudinal mechanical tension, enabling continuous variable coupling ratio in a single coupler. Furthermore, we confirm that the coupler is polarization insensitive, and does not require precise polarization alignment of an input beam. We demonstrate its robust coupling performance and applicability in forming a fiber laser ring cavity, and delivering and power splitting ultrafast laser pulse. The air-core air-gap coupling promises applications in mid-infrared and ultraviolet regions where the current coupling technology is limited.

Ultrashort pulse generation at the short-wave infrared (SWIR) wavelength ranges from 1.6 to $2.5\mu \mathrm{m}$ and together with benefits of the all-fiber design has transformed lasers into an essential tool for industrial, technological, scientific, environmental, and medical applications. With the development of pumping sources and fiber components, ultrafast SWIR fiber lasers have drawn exceptional research and industrial attention over the last decade, resulting in the achievement of comparable performance or even surpassing well-established near-IR sources. Exceptionally compact, highly stable, cost-effective, and maintenance-free ultrafast fiber lasers operating at the SWIR range are currently well on the way to be commercially employed. This invited Perspective article gives a comprehensive overview of the most significant achievements enabling ultrafast generation at SWIR, including up-to-date gain fibers and saturable absorbers, nonlinear process, and laser architectures. This article highlights the perspectives and strategies for further maturing of the field of SWIR fiber lasers and pathways for the improvement of the performance, overcoming existing bottlenecks and challenges toward reducing pulse durations, tunability of repetition rate, and power upscaling. The advancement of the ultrafast SWIR laser development is projected until the landscape of existing technologies, driven by these ultimate sources, and potential applications, emerging on the horizon.

An improved design for hollow core anti-resonant fibers (HAFs) is presented. A split cladding structure is introduced to reduce the fabrication distortion within design tolerance. We use numerical simulations to compare the Kagome fibers (KFs) and the proposed split cladding fibers (SCFs) over two normalized transmission bands. It reveals that SCFs are able to maintain the desired round shape of silica cladding walls, hence improving the confinement loss (CL) compared to the KF and is comparable to that of the nested antiresonant nodeless fiber (NANF) with the same core size. In addition, the SCF allows stacking multiple layers of cladding rings to control the CL. The influences of the number of cladding layers and the cladding gap width on the CL of the SCFs have been studied. SCF with three cladding rings is fabricated by the stack-and-draw technique. A measured attenuation spectrum matches well with the calculation prediction. The measured near field mode patterns also prove the feasibility of our fiber design.

We present the selective excitation of the fundamental mode in an anti-resonant hollow-core fiber (ARHCF) fusion-spliced with a commercial large mode area (LMA) fiber. By designing and fabricating a single-ring ARHCF that is mode-matched to a LMA fiber and by splicing the two using a C O 2 laser-based splicer, we achieve a coupling efficiency of 91.2% into the fundamental mode. We also demonstrate an all-fiber integration of an ARHCF with a commercial ytterbium-doped fiber in a laser cavity for beam delivery application. Coupling of the single-mode laser output beam into the fundamental mode of the ARHCF is demonstrated with 90.4% efficiency ( < 0.45 d B loss) for up to 50 W continuous wave beam in a stable and alignment-free all-fiber laser setup.

We propose a parabolic W-type thulium-doped fiber for the 1.7 µm high-energy femtosecond pulsed laser. Despite its attractive normal dispersion, the fiber offers high gain in 1.7 µm region thanks to its distributed short-pass filtering effect. With a proper dispersion management in an all-fiber chirped pulse amplification (CPA) scheme, we demonstrate so far the highest pulse energy of 128.0 nJ in a stable pulse of 174 fs in the 1.7–1.8 µm region, which marks above an order of magnitude improvement in pulse energy while exhibiting the shortest pulse duration among fiber-based CPA works at 1.7 µm. Hence, we provide a pathway to an energy scalable and efficient femtosecond laser at 1.7 µm via a compact and elegant all-fiber solution.

We demonstrate a high-energy and high-average power Mamyshev oscillator based on a high performance large-mode-area step-index germanosilicate-cladding Yb-doped fiber. The oscillation of higher-order modes is effectively suppressed by employing appropriate intracavity spatial mode filtering, allowing significant scaling of single pulse energy. The laser directly generates a nearly diffraction-limited beam with an average power of 17 W operating at the fundamental repetition rate of 14.01 MHz, corresponding to a pulse energy of 1.2 µJ. The pulses could be externally dechirped to ∼58 fs, leading to a peak power of ∼13 MW. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest pulse energy with sub-100 fs duration ever obtained directly from a mode-locked fiber oscillator.