All-fiber passively mode-locked laser based on a chiral fiber grating

A novel passively mode-locked all-fiber laser using a chiral fiber grating as a polarization-selective element is demonstrated for the first time, to the best of our knowledge. The chiral fiber grating serves as a key component to form an artificial saturable absorber to realize mode locking through nonlinear polarization rotation in the cavity. The laser generates stable short pulses with energy of 0.34 nJ, a fundamental repetition rate of 3.27 MHz, and an FWHM bandwidth of 28 nm. We also show that harmonic modelocked pulse trains of different orders can be obtained by increasing the pump power.