A Q-switched, mode-locked fiber laser employing subharmonic cavity modulation

We present a new and simple approach for the generation of Q-switched, mode-locked pulses from a laser cavity. The approach is based on cavity loss modulation that employs a subharmonic frequency of the fundamental intermode frequency spacing. A range of experiments have been carried out using an erbium-doped fiber-based ring cavity laser in order to verify that this simple approach can readily produce high quality Q-switched, mode-locked pulses. An active tuning of the Q-switched envelope repetition rate is also shown to be easily achievable by adjusting the order of the applied subharmonic frequency. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America