This Letter shows the Vernier effect based on two segments of PANDA polarization maintaining fiber (PMF), whose lengths are 28 and 23 cm, respectively. The two PMFs are spliced together, and the angle between the fast axes is set to 45°. This cascaded PMF is inserted in a Sagnac loop to form an interferometer that can generate the Vernier effect. The spectrum consists of finesse fringe and envelope and realizes simultaneous measurement of strain and temperature. The envelope can provide strain and temperature sensitivities of 58.0 pm/με and 1.05 nm/°C. The finesse fringe provides sensitivities of 5.9 pm/με and 1.36 nm/°C.

We demonstrate a coherent synthesis system based on femtosecond Yb-doped fiber laser technology. The output pulse of the amplification system is divided into two replicas and seeded into photonic crystal fibers of two parallel branches for nonlinear pulse compression. Because of the different nonlinear dynamics in the photonic crystal fibers, the compressed pulses show different spectra, which can be spliced to form a broad coherent spectrum. The integrated timing jitter between the pulses of two branches is less than one tenth of an optical cycle. By coherently synthesizing pulses from these two branches, 8 fs few-cycle pulses are produced.

A high power linearly polarized tunable Raman random fiber laser (RFL) was studied theoretically and experimentally. The parameters required for the system design were obtained through numerical simulation, based on which a hundred-watt-level linearly polarized tunable RFL was successfully demonstrated. The central wavelength can be continuously tuned from 1113.76 to 1137.44 nm, and the output power exceeds 100 W for all of the lasing wavelengths with the polarization extinction ratio (PER) exceeding 20 dB at the maximum output power. Besides, the linewidth, spectral evolution, and temporal dynamics of a specified wavelength (1124.72 nm) were investigated in detail. Moreover, the theoretical results and the experimental results fit well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time for a hundred-watt-level linearly polarized tunable RFL ever reported.

In this paper, we propose and experimentally investigate a linearly polarized narrow-linewidth random fiber laser (RFL) operating at 1080 nm and boost the output power to kilowatt level with near-diffraction-limited beam quality using a master oscillation power amplifier. The RFL based on a half-opened cavity, which is composed of a linearly polarized narrow-linewidth fiber Bragg grating and a 500 m piece of polarization-maintained Ge-doped fiber, generates a 0.71 W seed laser with an 88 pm full width at half-maximum (FWHM) linewidth and a 22.5 dB polarization extinction ratio (PER) for power scaling. A two-stage fiber amplifier enhances the seed laser to the maximal 1.01 kW with a PER value of 17 dB and a beam quality of Mx2=1.15 and My2=1.13. No stimulated Brillouin scattering effect is observed at the ultimate power level, and the FWHM linewidth of the amplified random laser broadens linearly as a function of the output power with a coefficient of about 0.1237pm/W. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a linearly polarized narrow-linewidth RFL with even kilowatt-level near-diffraction-limited output, and further performance scaling is ongoing.

We propose a novel waveguide design of a polarization-maintaining few mode fiber (PM-FMF) supporting ≥10 non-degenerate modes, utilizing a central circular air hole and a circumjacent elliptical-ring core. The structure endows a new degree of freedom to adjust the birefringence of all the guided modes, including the fundamental polarization mode. Numerical simulations demonstrate that, by optimizing the air hole and elliptical-ring core, a PM-FMF supporting 10 distinctive polarization modes has been achieved, and the effective index difference Δneff between the adjacent guided modes could be kept larger than 1.32×10 4 over the whole C+L band. The proposed fiber structure can be flexibly tailored to support an even larger number of modes in PM-FMF (14-mode PM-FMF has been demonstrated as an example), which can be readily applicable to a scalable mode division multiplexing system.

We report on the high-power amplification of a 1064 nm linearly polarized laser in an all-fiber polarization-maintained master oscillator power amplifier, which can operate at an output power level of 1.3 kW. The beam quality (M2) was measured to be <1.2 at full power operation. The polarization extinction rate of the fiber amplifier was measured to be above 94% before mode instabilities (MIs) set in, which reduced to about 90% after the onset of MI. The power scaling capability of strategies for suppressing MI is analyzed based on a semianalytical model, the theoretical results of which agree with the experimental results. It shows that mitigating MI by coiling the gain fiber is an effective and practical method in standard double-cladding large mode area fiber, and, by tight coiling of the gain fiber to the radius of 5.5 cm, the MI threshold can be increased to three times higher than that without coiling or loose coiling. Experimental studies have been carried out to verify the idea, which has proved that MI was suppressed successfully in the amplifier by proper coiling.

The spin effect on a single-mode single-polarization optical fiber is investigated theoretically and numerically. To get a practical single elliptically polarized fiber the normalized spin rate must be in the range of 0.2–0.35. A single elliptically polarized fiber with a normalized spin rate around 0.224 is demonstrated. It has a broad band from 1.530 to 1.558 μm, in which the low-leakage elliptically polarized eigenmode loss is kept within 1.2 dB while the high-leakage elliptically polarized eigenmode loss is greater than 20 dB. This fiber can be used as an elliptical polarizer or applied in current sensing.