Photonic sampling analog-to-digital conversion based on time and wavelength interleaved ultra-short optical pulse train generated by using monolithic integrated LNOI intensity and phase modulator.

High-speed analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) is experimentally demonstrated by employing a time and wavelength interleaved ultra-short optical pulse train to achieve photonic sampling and using wavelength division demultiplexing to realize speed matching between the fast optical front-end and the slow electronic back-end. The sampling optical pulse train is generated from a cavity-less ultra-short optical pulse source involving a packaged device that monolithically integrates an intensity modulator and a phase modulator into a chip based on lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI). In the experiment, the fiber-to-fiber insertion loss of the packaged modulation device is measured to be 6.9 dB. In addition, the half-wave voltages of the Mach-Zehnder modulator and the phase modulator in the LNOI-based modulation device are measured to be 3.6 V and 3.4 V at 5 GHz, respectively. These parameters and the device size are superior to those based on cascaded commercial devices. Through using the packaged modulation device, two ultra-short optical pulse trains centered at 1541.40 nm and 1555.64 nm are generated with time jitters of 19.2 fs and 18.9 fs in the integral offset frequency range of 1 kHz to 10 MHz, respectively, and are perfectly time interleaved into a single pulse train with a repetition rate of 10 GHz and a time jitter of 19.8 fs. Based on the time and wavelength interleaved ultra-short optical pulse train, direct digitization of microwave signals within the frequency range of 1 GHz to 40 GHz is demonstrated by using a two-channel wavelength demultiplexing photonic ADC architecture, where the effective number of bits are 5.85 bits and 3.75 bits for the input signal at 1.1 GHz and 36.3 GHz, respectively.

Single-shot photonic time-stretch digitizer using a dissipative soliton-based passively mode-locked fiber laser.

We demonstrate a single-shot photonic time-stretch digitizer using a dissipative soliton-based passively mode-locked fiber laser. The theoretical analysis and simulation results indicate that the dissipative soliton-based optical source with a flat spectrum relieves the envelope-induced signal distortion, and its high energy spectral density helps to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, both of which are favorable for simplifying the optical front-end architecture of a photonic time-stretch digitizer. By employing a homemade dissipative soliton-based passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser in a single-shot photonic time-stretch digitizer, an effective number of bits of 4.11 bits under an effective sampling rate of 100 GS/s is experimentally obtained without optical amplification in the link and pulse envelope removing process.

34 nm-wavelength-tunable picosecond Ho3+/Pr3+-codoped ZBLAN fiber laser.

We propose and demonstrate a broadly wavelength-tunable mode-locked Ho3+/Pr3+-codoped ZBLAN fiber laser operating in the 3 µm mid-infrared spectral region based on a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror. Wavelength selection is realized by rotating a plane ruled grating. The fiber laser exhibits stable continuous-wave mode-locking operation over a wide wavelength tuning range of 34 nm (2842.2 nm~2876.2 nm), with a 10.17 MHz repetition rate and 22 ps pulse duration. Stable mode-locked pulses can be maintained until the launched pump power of 1.25 W. Maximum average output power of 127.7 mW and the corresponding pulse energy of 12.56 nJ are achieved. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a wavelength-tunable mode-locked fiber laser operating in the 3 µm spectral region. Such simple, robust, and versatile mid-infrared picosecond laser source can find various applications in laser surgery, spectroscopy, and nonlinear frequency conversion.

Widely wavelength tunable gain-switched Er3+-doped ZBLAN fiber laser around 2.8 µm.

In this paper, we demonstrate a wavelength widely tunable gain-switched Er3+-doped ZBLAN fiber laser around 2.8 µm. The laser can be tuned over 170 nm (2699 nm~2869.9 nm) for various pump power levels, while maintaining stable µs-level single-pulse gain-switched operation with controllable output pulse duration at a selectable repetition rate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first wavelength tunable gain-switched fiber laser in the 3 µm spectral region with the broadest tuning range (doubling the record tuning range) of the pulsed fiber lasers around 3 µm. Influences of pump energy and power on the output gain-switched laser performances are investigated in detail. This robust, simple, and versatile mid-infrared pulsed fiber laser source is highly suitable for many applications including laser surgery, material processing, sensing, spectroscopy, as well as serving as a practical seed source in master oscillator power amplifiers.

Multipulse dynamics under dissipative soliton resonance conditions.

The stable multipulse emission from an erbium-doped mode-locked fiber laser in dissipative soliton resonance (DSR) regime is numerically and experimentally investigated. It shows that in the multipulse operation of DSR, all pulses have identical characteristics. The number of these pulses is determined by the initial conditions, and keeps constant with the growth of pump power. Experimental results match well with the theoretical simulations. In the experiment, we obtain as high as 86 dual-wavelength DSR pulses, which have the same characteristics and are equally spaced in the cavity. Since the pulses behave similarly to harmonic mode-locking (HML), we call this phenomenon HML under DSR. By properly adjusting the polarization controllers, other numbers of multipulse emission in DSR region can be observed, which confirms that the number of DSR pulses depends on the initial conditions.