We reported on the generation of the dual-wavelength rectangular pulse in an erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) with a topological insulator saturable absorber. The rectangular pulse could be stably initiated with pulse width from 13.62 to 25.16 ns and fundamental repetition rate of 3.54 MHz by properly adjusting the pump power and the polarization state. In addition, we verified that the pulse shape of the dual-wavelength rectangular pulse can be affected by the total net cavity dispersion in the fiber laser. Furthermore, by properly rotating the polarization controllers, the harmonic mode-locking operation of the dual-wavelength rectangular pulse was also obtained. The dual-wavelength rectangular pulse EDFL would benefit some potential applications, such as spectroscopy, biomedicine, and sensing research.

We experimentally demonstrate a multi-wavelength ultrafast erbium-doped fiber laser incorporating a μm-scale topological insulator: Bi2Se3/Polyvinyl Alcohol film as both an excellent saturable absorber for mode-locking and a high-nonlinear medium to induce a giant third order optical nonlinear effect for mitigating the mode competition of erbium-doped fiber laser and stabilizing the multi-wavelength oscillation. By properly adjusting the pump power and the polarization state, the single-, dual-, triple-, four-wavelength mode-locking pulse could be stably initiated. For the four-wavelength operation, we obtain its pulse width of ∼22 ps and a fundamental repetition rate of 8.83 MHz. The fiber laser exhibits the maximum output power of 9.7 mW with the pulse energy of 1.1 nJ and peak power of 50 W at the pump power of 155 mW. Our study shows that the simple, stable, low-cost multi-wavelength ultrafast fiber laser could be applied in various potential fields, such as optical communication, biomedical research, and radar system.

A new hybrid Brillouin erbium fiber laser scheme that employs cascaded multiple Brillouin gain fibers in a ring cavity to realize multiwavelength laser output with switchable frequency spacing is proposed and experimentally investigated. The multiple frequency downshifting processes introduced by multiple stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) effects in one round-trip of the cavity make it possible to realize multiwavelength output with frequency spacing that is an integer multiple of the SBS frequency shifting. With two cascaded SBS fibers, the frequency spacing can be switched between single and double SBS frequency shifting by properly adjusting the Brillouin pump power. Multiwavelength outputs with triple or quadruple SBS frequency spacing are also demonstrated by employing three or four SBS gain fibers, respectively.