Tunable Multiwavelength Erbium-doped Fiber Laser Based on an In-line Mach Zehnder Interferometer

A tunable multiwavelength erbium-doped fiber laser based on an in-line Mach Zehnder interferometer is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The in-line Mach Zehnder interferometer is realized by using cascaded long-period fiber gratings. The long-period fiber gratings can couple the guided core mode to several cladding modes. If two identical long-period fiber gratings are concatenated, an interference pattern can be generated, which results from an interaction of the core and the cladding modes in the second long-period fiber grating. Therefore, a simple multichannel filter based on an in-line Mach Zehnder interferometer can be realized. The wavelength spacing of the proposed multichannel filter is controlled by the number of long-period fiber gratings. We apply the proposed multichannel fiber to the generation of a multiwavelength erbium-doped fiber laser with a tunability on the order of the wavelength spacing. An erbium-doped fiber amplifier is implemented as a gain medium. The gain competition of erbium ions is suppressed by soaking the erbium-doped fiber in liquid nitrogen. The power fluctuation of the proposed multiwavelength fiber laser is measured to be less than 0.5 dB. A high-quality multiwavelength output with a high extinction ratio of more than 40 dB is achieved. The wavelength spacing of the proposed multiwavelength fiber laser is controlled by increasing the number of long-period fiber gratings. The wavelength spacing is changed from 0.8 nm to 1.6 nm discretely.This work was supported by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-2009-N)