Tunable Actively Mode-locked Bi-doped O-band Fibre Laser

Widely tunable pulsed fibre laser sources in the O-band (1260-1360nm) are of interest in a variety of fields including spectroscopy, optical communication, time-resolved measurements, and optical system diagnostics [1] . Furthermore, major constituents of biological tissues such as water, oxyhemoglobin, and melanin exhibit minimum optical loss windows in the 1300nm band pointing to applications in medicine [2] . Bi-doped phoshosilicate fibres (BPSFs) have recently been investigated as a promising medium to develop new wavelength lasers and amplifiers in the O-band [3] . They exhibit broad emission spectra which is an important characteristic for developing widely tunable pulsed laser sources [4] . However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no reports of tunable pulsed Bi-doped fibre lasers around 1300nm. Here, we demonstrate an actively tunable mode-locked Bi-doped fibre laser (ML-BDFL) operating in the wavelength region from 1300-1370nm.