A self-starting all-fiber passively mode-locked Tm³⁺-doped fiber laser based on nonlinear loop mirror (NOLM) is demonstrated. Stable soliton pulses centered at 2017.33 nm with 1.56 nm FWHM were produced at a repetition rate of 1.514 MHz with pulse duration of 2.8 ps and pulse energy of 83.8 pJ. As increased pump power, the oscillator can also operate at noise-like (NL) regime. Stable NL pulses with coherence spike width of 341 fs and pulse energy of up to 249.32 nJ was achieved at a center wavelength of 2017.24 nm with 21.33 nm FWHM. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first 2 µm region NOLM-based mode-locked fiber laser operating at two regimes with the highest single pulse energy for NL pulses.

In this letter, we report on the inscription of a fourth-order fiber Bragg grating made line-by-line in the optical fiber using a femtosecond laser. Strong Bragg resonance (~17 dB) and low insertion loss (~0.5 dB) were obtained with only 2000 periods. Measured refractive index change of these inscribed lines reaches up to 7 × 10^-3. The grating was fully characterized and the low insertion loss together with low polarization-dependent loss were realized compared to gratings made by the point-by-point method. The high temperature annealing experiment shows the grating can survive up to at least 800°C.

Two fundamental laser physics phenomena - dissipative soliton and polarisation of light are recently merged to the concept of vector dissipative soliton (VDS), viz. train of short pulses with specific state of polarisation (SOP) and shape defined by an interplay between anisotropy, gain/loss, dispersion, and nonlinearity. Emergence of VDSs is both of the fundamental scientific interest and is also a promising technique for control of dynamic SOPs important for numerous applications from nano-optics to high capacity fibre optic communications. Using specially designed and developed fast polarimeter, we present here the first experimental results on SOP evolution of vector soliton molecules with periodic polarisation switching between two and three SOPs and superposition of polarisation switching with SOP precessing. The underlying physics presents an interplay between linear and circular birefringence of a laser cavity along with light induced anisotropy caused by polarisation hole burning.

This review offers new perspectives on the subject and highlights an area in need of further research. It includes an analysis of current scientific literature mainly covering the last decade and examines the trends in the development of electronic, acoustic and optical-fiber humidity sensors over this period. The major findings indicate that a new generation of sensor technology based on optical fibers is emerging. The current trends suggest that electronic humidity sensors could soon be replaced by sensors that are based on photonic structures. Recent scientific advances are expected to allow dedicated systems to avoid the relatively high price of interrogation modules that is currently a major disadvantage of fiber-based sensors.

We report an all-fiber mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) employing carbon nanotube (CNT) polymer composite film. By using only standard telecom grade components, without any complex polarization control elements in the laser cavity, we have demonstrated polarization locked vector solitons generation with duration of $\sim 583\mathrm{fs}$, average power of $\sim 3\mathrm{mW}$ (pulse energy of $118\mathrm{pJ}$) at the repetition rate of $\sim 25.7\mathrm{MHz}$.

We investigated an all-fiber mode converter based on long-period fiber gratings (LPFGs) written in the few-mode fiber. Mode conversion between the fundamental core mode and different higher-order core modes (${\mathrm{LP}}_{11}$, ${\mathrm{LP}}_{21}$, and ${\mathrm{LP}}_{02}$ modes) can be realized via a single LPFG with an efficiency of 99% at the resonance wavelength. Moreover, optimized mode conversion between the ${\mathrm{LP}}_{01}$ and ${\mathrm{LP}}_{21}$ modes can be realized by cascading two LPFGs with different grating pitches. The maximum conversion efficiency is estimated to be $\sim 99.5\%$ at 1553 nm. The orbital angular momentum states with different topological charges ($\pm 1,\pm 2$) are demonstrated experimentally. The all-fiber LPFG mode converters could have promising applications in the mode-division multiplexing optical communications.