Mode-locked fiber laser based on chalcogenide microwires

We report the first mode-locked fiber laser using a chalco-genide microwire as the nonlinear medium. The laser is passively mode-locked with nonlinear polarization rotation and can be adjusted for the emission of solitons or noise-like pulses. The use of the microwire leads to a mode-locking threshold at the microwatt level and shortens the cavity length by 4 orders of magnitude with respect to other lasers of its kind. The controlled birefringence of the microwire, combined with a linear polarizer in the cavity, enables multi-wavelength laser operation with tunable central wavelength, switchable wavelength separation, and a variable number of laser wavelengths. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America