Widely tunable S-band fiber-ring lasers and broadband amplified spontaneous emission sources with thulium-doped fluoride fibers

This paper reports our investigation on widely tunable fiber-ring lasers and broadband amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) light sources with thulium-doped fluoride fibers (TDFs). The experimental results for thulium-doped optical fiber amplifiers will also be discussed. We achieved widely tunable fiber lasers that had tuning ranges of 94 nm with 1550 nm + 1050 nm pump configurations and of 85 nm with 1550 nm + 1400 nm pump configurations, respectively. It was observed that the lasers oscillated under multilongitudinal-mode operation with linewidth of 400 MHz, signal-to-source noise ratio of 60 dB, and power stability of 0.003 dB for a laser output of 1 mW. A broadband ASE source with a power density of more than -15 dBm/nm between 1465 and 1535 nm was also demonstrated with a novel hybrid configuration by using both TDF and erbium-doped fiber.