Tunable bistability in hybrid Brillouin–erbium single-frequency fiber laser with saturable absorber
- Resource Type
- Article
- Authors
- Wang, Tantan; Zhang, Liang; Feng, Cheng; Qin, Minglei; Zhan, Li
- Source
- Journal of the Optical Society of America B: Optical Physics; August 2016, Vol. 33 Issue: 8 p1635-1639, 5p
- Subject
- Language
- ISSN
- 07403224; 15208540
We demonstrate optical bistability with flexible tunability based on a single-frequency hybrid Brillouin–erbium fiber laser with a saturable absorber. An unpumped erbium-doped fiber is used as the saturable absorber to play the role of a dynamic ultranarrow self-tracking filter and suppress the multiple-longitudinal-mode operation. By properly adjusting the power of two pumps (980 nm pump and Brillouin pump), the bistable region can be conveniently tuned from 23 mW to ∼1 W. The smallest bistable region (23 mW) appears under a fixed Brillouin pump power (1.104 W). The result shows that the proposed fiber laser performs a single-longitudinal-mode status with excellent stability of the output wavelength and optical power.