ULTRAFAST FIBER-LASER-BASED SATURABLE ABSORBER CHARACTERISATION TECHNIQUE

The development of ultrashort pulse lasers made possibility to employ them with new advanced applications in biomedicine, micro and nano machining, remote sensing. Althought, there are a lot of different methods to generate short optical pulses, the simplest and the most adopted is to use a saturable absorber to initiate mode-locking [1]. But, for achieving best laser performance with good pulse generation thresholds and ensure repeatability of chosen system, it is necessary to determine all saturation parameters [2]. Instead of using conventional expensive ultrashort pulse laser, a femtosecond fiber laser could be as an alternative. In this paper, we report a saturable absorber (SA) and a saturable absorber mirror (SAM) characterisation technique using femtosecond Ytterbium (Yb) doped mode-locked fiber laser. Due to broad spectrum of Yb:fiber active medium, as well as fiber Bragg grating (FBG) tunability, there is a possibility to adjust generation wavelength over vide range (<30nm), so that SA for different purposes could be investigated.