A novel actively and passively mode locked fiber laser with dispersion-imbalanced loop mirror

In this letter, a dispersion imbalanced loop mirror (DILM:) was constructed by the use of one segment of high dispersion fiber and another segment of much lower dispersion. Based on the nonlinear switching properties of the D ILM, a 10 GHz actively and passively mode locked fiber laser was demonstrat ed for the first time to our knowledge. In this laser, the DILM was acted a s not only a passive element to make further compression of the pulse but a lso an in-band ASE filter to increase the stability of the laser. Optical p ulses possessing narrow pulse width (3.1 ps) and low timing jitter (400 fs) were generated successfully. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights res erved.