Efficient coherent combining of tunable erbium-doped fibre ring lasers

Two ring cavity tunable erbium-doped fibre lasers are coherently combined by employing a Mach–Zehnder interferometer in the laser cavity. The combining efficiency is about 95% over the tuning range from 1530 to 1565 nm, which is further improved to be larger than 97% by moving the optical tunable filter from the common arm to the branch arm of the Mach–Zehnder interferometer. The proposed combining scheme is expected to exhibit the potential ability of efficiently combining lasers with different powers and even different output coupling ratios.

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