Like any other laser, a fibre laser consists of an active medium (in this case a piece of doped optical fibre) between two feedback elements. While Fresnel reflection from the fibre end facet can assume the role of a broadband partially reflecting output coupler, fibre Bragg gratings (FBGs) are an obvious choice for the implementation of a frequency selective high reflector in an all-fibre desi...

Performance and stability of a field fibre optics interferometric current sensor are presented, showing a ±0.5% accuracy over a broad temperature range and an excellent insensitivity to the sensing fibre positioning. INTRODUCTION This paper presents the latest evaluations performed on an interferometric Sagnac fibre optics current sensor developed by the Metrology Laboratory in the Swiss Federa...

The present work demonstrates a fibre-laser system with automatic electronic-controlled triggering of dissipative soliton generation mode. Passive mode locking based on the effect of non-linear polarisation evolution has been achieved through a polarisation controller containing a single low-voltage liquid crystal plate whose optimal wave delay was determined from analysis of inter-mode beat sp...

The Raman pumps consist of 90 mW backward-propagating 1495 nm polarisation multiplexed pumps for the longer wavelength region, along with forward and backward 1410 nm polarisation multiplexed pumps for the shorter wavelength region. The 1410 nm forward pump is 150 mW and the backward pump is 2 10 mW. 50 km of nonzero dispersion shifted fibre with roughly 14.3 dB attenuation is used for transmis...

Polarisation measurements of pulsars and of their pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) are uniquely able to provide deep insights into the highly magnetised relativistic environment of young, rotationpowered isolated neutron stars (INSs). Besides the radio band, optical observations are primarily suited to providing such insights. The first INS for which optical polarisation observations were performed i...

Understanding and controlling the manufacturing process of producing (“drawing”) microstructured optical fibres (“holey fibres”) is of paramount importance in obtaining optimal control of the final fibre geometry and identifying industrially useful production regimes. The high cost of the manufacturing process and the challenge of ensuring reproducible final fibre geometries renders theoretical...

Two fundamental laser physics phenomena--dissipative soliton and polarisation of light are recently merged to the concept of vector dissipative soliton (VDS), viz. train of short pulses with specific state of polarisation (SOP) and shape defined by an interplay between anisotropy, gain/loss, dispersion, and nonlinearity. Emergence of VDSs is both of the fundamental scientific interest and is al...

Introduction: In high-speed fibre-optic communication systems, polarisation-mode dispersion (PMD) is one of the most important factors of performance degradation. In-situ monitoring of PMD in live, multichannel WDM systems will be a key requirement for future dynamic optical networks to ensure quality of operation. Especially, for optical links with exceptionally high PMD values, an in-situ mon...