Advances in Fiber Laser Mode Locking

Dear Colleagues,

Fiber lasers, which can be widely tuned and work efficiently from continuous-wave operation to optical pulses, feature excellent beam quality, compact structure, cost efficiency, and easy thermal management. Pulsed fiber lasers have opened widespread applications in optical communication, laser micromachining, precision metrology, biological photonics, and scientific research because of their optical pulses with high peak power, broad bandwidth, and short duration ranging from the nanosecond to the femtosecond level. The generation of short pulses is often referred to as mode locking, which is generally initiated from noise and achieves locking the phases of numerous longitudinal modes inside the laser cavity. In terms of realization approaches, mode-locking techniques can be classified as active or passive. Active mode locking employs an external signal to induce a cavity-loss or cavity-gain modulation inside the resonator, whereas passive mode locking requires a saturable absorber which causes self-amplitude modulation of the field. During the past few years, there have been considerable advances in fiber laser mode locking with the development of two-dimensional materials, understanding of complex nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics in multimode fiber cavities, and emergence of automatic mode-locking techniques. These progresses have provided promising ways to develop the pulsed fiber lasers with broad spectral bandwidth, new central wavelength, high pulse energy, high repetition rate, long-term stability, and extensive tunability.  

This Special Issue aims to present original state-of-the-art research articles on “Advances in Fiber Laser Mode Locking”. Researchers are invited to submit their contributions to this Special Issue. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Actively and passively mode-locked fiber lasers;
• Automatic mode locking with the genetic algorithm, human-like algorithm, etc.;
• Spatiotemporal mode locking;
• Fourier domain mode locking;
• Kerr nonlinear beam cleanup;
• Harmonic mode locking;
• Material saturable absorbers including two-dimensional materials, SESAM, etc.;
• Artificial saturable absorber including nonlinear polarization evolution, nonlinear loop mirrors, etc.;
• Nonlinear dynamics of mode-locked fiber lasers;
• Various operation states, such as soliton rain, soliton explosion, multi-wavelength, multi-pulse, noise-like pulse, etc.

Dr. Chuncan Wang
Dr. Huai Wei
Dr. Fanchao Meng
Guest Editors

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• fiber laser
• mode locking
• mode locker
• artificial intelligence
• nonlinear dynamics