Narrow bandwidth passively mode locked picosecond Erbium doped fiber laser using a 45° tilted fiber grating device

An all-fiber passively picosecond mode locked Erbium doped laser using a 45° tilted fiber grating (45° TFG) and a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) is reported in this work. Due to the strong polarization dependent loss (PDL) of 45° TFG and narrow 3-dB bandwidth of FBG, the Erbium doped fiber laser (EDFL) can generate picosecond mode locked pulse based on the nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) effect. The laser features a repetition rate of 9.67 MHz, a pulse duration of 33 ps, a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 70 dB, an average output power of 1.2 mW, and a single pulse energy of 124 pJ under the pump power of 102 mW. Besides, the central wavelength of the laser can be continuously adjusted from 1550.65 nm to 1551.44 nm. The technique of using a 45° TFG to generate picosecond pulses can be readily extended to other wavelength such as mid-infrared (mid-IR) where fiber polarizing components are either expensive or not available. To the best of our knowledge, the spectral width is the narrowest among all-fiber passively mode locked Erbium-doped laser based on NPR.