A fiber-optic Mach Zehnder interferometer (MZI) refractive index (RI) sensor based on a double peanut-shaped structure in Er-doped fiber with a section of tapered fiber was fabricated using fusion splicer and experimentally demonstrated. The double peanut-shaped structures placed at both ends of the sensor function as beam splitting/combining. Besides, the tapered region works as the sensing area. With RI changes, the optical path difference between the core mode and the cladding modes will change correspondingly, resulting in interference spectrum shifting. By monitoring the shift, the measured RI can be obtained. The experimental results show that the RI sensitivity was significantly improved compared with other types of peanut-shaped fiber sensors. By comparing different taper diameters, it is found that the finer the tapered fiber, the higher the sensitivity of measuring RI.High RI sensitivity of 441.56 nm/RIU is obtained in the experiments. Compared with the similar-structure sensor consisted of single-mode fiber (SMF), the sensitivity of the proposed sensor based on Er-doped fiber is 115.22 nm/RIU higher than that of the former. The proposed sensor has the characteristics of a compact structure. In addition, it has potential in environmental, medical, and aerospace monitoring applications.

In this work, we demonstrated the Tm/Al co-doped silica glass fabricated by the laser additive manufacturing technology for the first time. The measurements show that the glass was doped with ${\rm{Tm^{3+}}}$ concentration of 1.64 wt% without any crystallization. The ${\rm{Tm^{3+}}}$ and ${\rm{Al^{3+}}}$ were uniformly distributed and no additional defects were introduced during the fabrication process. The glass exhibits low hydroxyl content level of 11.56 ppm. Using the prepared silica glass as the core rod, a Tm/Al co-doped photonic crystal fiber (PCF) was fabricated and performed 13.5 % slope efficiency with nearly 600 mW output laser power. This novel technology provides an alternative method to fabricate Tm-doped fiber materials with high homogeneity and large core size, promoting the further spread and development of 2 μm fiber lasers.

We investigate the power scaling and thermal management of multi-point side-pumped 2.825 µm heavily-erbium-doped fluoride fiber lasers by numerical simulation. The 4-point (or 6-point) erbium-doped fluoride fiber laser with polished erbium-doped fluoride fiber-based side-pump couplers delivers an output laser power of over 100 W at each launched 981 nm pump power of 100 W (or 75 W). Meanwhile, the core temperature increases of the gain fiber tips are below 1 K, making it possible for a highly reflective fiber Bragg grating to work stably in high-power operation. Once the preparation processes of these erbium-doped fluoride fiber-based side-pump couplers and endcaps with effective coatings are mature, the proposed multi-point side-pumped erbium-doped fluoride fiber lasers with some feasibility may theoretically pave the way for the development of hundred-watt mid-infrared fiber lasers with effective thermal management.

We demonstrated Tm3+-doped silica glass rod was successfully manufactured by laser sintering technique and it was made into Tm3+-doped microstructure optical fiber by stack-capillary-draw method. Based on the absorption spectrum, the core glass shows outstanding spectroscopic properties through Judd-Ofelt analysis. Fiber core-cladding structure was preserved completely without any crystallization in the core. Besides, a self-built fiber laser at 1.95 m produces 740 mW output power with a slope efficiency of 16.73 %. The results prove that our laser sintering technique is a promising preparation method to acquire fiber materials for 2.0 m laser.

Supercontinuum generation via direct pumping of unamplified high-repetition-rate, sub-100 fs pulses with a pulse energy lower than 50 pJ is superior in noise performance and features a high acquisition speed. We demonstrate a novel, to the best of our knowledge, gigahertz-repetition-rate, mode-locked Yb-doped fiber laser, where the hybrid mode-locking approach is employed. The laser has a low initiating threshold of 300 mW and a broad mode-locking range of 600 mW (300–900 mW) in terms of pump power. The shortest obtained pulse width of the laser after compression is 95 fs, and the highest output pulse energy is 92.9 pJ at a fundamental repetition rate of 1.15 GHz. Moreover, the laser’s output polarization states are switchable, and it has a polarization extinction ratio of 17.9 dB.