Additive mode-locked resembling pulses in a Tm-doped fiber laser with a hybrid cavity configuration

We report on the generation of modulated spikes distributed across a mode-locked pulse profile, which is termed as additive mode-locked resembling (AMLR), in a Tm-doped fiber laser with a hybrid cavity configuration based on nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) technique. The hybrid cavity configuration is composed of a ring cavity containing a micro Fabry-Perot (F-P) cavity. The F-P cavity is used to take the cavitytrip frequency (CTF) modulation on the mode-locked pulses for forming AMLR pulses. We observe AMLR pulses with uniform and chirped modulation depths, as well as uniform and nonuniform spike separations, respectively. Numerical simulations confirm the experimental observations and show that the filtering effect of the F-P cavity is the main mechanism for taking CTF modulation on mode-locked pulses to generate AMLR pulses. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America