Compact, robust and high repetition rate fiber mode-locked lasers have played major roles in many applications [1, 2], including high-precision spectroscopy [3, 4], massive optical communications [5], biomedical research [6] and dimensional metrology [7–9], with their unique characteristics, such as an ultra-short pulse duration, high peak power, spectral purity and broad spectrum. Specifically, fiber-based mode-locked lasers have many advantages, including compactness, stable and robust operation, low power consumption, and cost-effectiveness. Such advantages have allowed fiber-based mode-locked lasers to enter the mainstream of the mode-locked lasers [10, 11]. Fiber mode-locked lasers have been demonstrated with various mode-locking techniques, including polarization-based methods such as nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) [12] and a nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) [13] as well as methods that rely on a saturable absorber, such as the semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) [14], carbon nanotubes (CNT) [15], graphene [16, 17], and various 2D materials [18–20].
Saturable absorbers have been widely used to generate an ultrafast mode-locked laser, particularly due to their ease of use. Saturable-absorber-based mode-locked lasers are generally operated in the soliton pulse regime, where self-phase modulation and intracavity dispersion are balanced [21]. However, soliton mode-locking is associated with limited low output power levels and a relatively narrow spectral bandwidth. For example, soliton mode-locked lasers have output power of only a few milliwatts and a spectral bandwidth of a few nanometers at a central wavelength of 1550 nm [22]. To cover a wide spectral bandwidth, the power of soliton mode-locked lasers must be amplified, and they require nonlinear fiber for spectral broadening. Instead of power amplification and spectral broadening, wavelength-tunable mode-locked fiber lasers using a tunable bandpass filter inside the laser cavity have also been proposed to cover a broad spectral range.
Figure 1 shows an overview of current state-of-the-art C-band tunable mode-locked fiber lasers in terms of their wavelength range and pulse repetition rate [15, 23–36]. Wavelength-tunable mode-locked fiber lasers operating on the C-band are central-wavelength tuned with a thin-film filter [23, 26, 28], an intrinsic cavity birefringence filter effect [24, 36], a stretchable grating [25], a 45° tilted fiber grating [27, 33], a supermode interference filter [29], a birefringence Sagnac filter [30, 35], a cascaded dual-single-mode fiber-graded index multimode fiber-single mode fiber structure [31], and grating with aperture tuning [32, 34]. Many wavelength-tunable mode-locked fiber lasers have been reported with broad tunability of the wavelength; however, their repetition rates have remained below the range of tens of megahertz due to their long intracavity length. These mode-locked lasers with low repetition rates cannot easily realize high-performance frequency comb-based optical metrology due to their high timing jitter and poor laser noise. For such high-end frequency comb applications, high-repetition-rate mode-locked lasers are required for their high spectral purity and low timing jitter [37].
In this article, we report the highest repetition rate of a full C-band tunable mode-locked fiber laser. The Fabry-Perot type of laser cavity enables the repetition rate to exceed 100 MHz due to its simple structure. The all-polarization-maintaining fiber structure enables compact, robust and stable operation of the mode-locked laser [38–42]. The most widely used technique for a saturable absorber is the SESAM, which has been successfully commercialized while others are only demonstrated under laboratory conditions. The reliability and stability of the SESAM technique can sufficiently generate ultra-short pulses and mode-locking without any tight environmental control. In this study, the SESAM technique was used as a mode locker for turn-key operation. Our fully C-band wavelength-tunable mode-locked fiber laser maintains a mode-locking state as its central wavelength is tuned from 1533.7 nm to 1565.6 nm. The repetition rate of the fully C-band wavelength-tunable mode-locked fiber laser is 126.5 MHz, which is the highest repetition rate among all C-band wavelength-tunable mode-locked lasers reported thus far.