Development of efficient L and U band lasers for optical communication and sensing applications

Recently, fiber laser technology has been rapidly growing because of its relevance in a variety of applications; such as in industrial material processing, medical procedures, remote sensing, scientific instrumentation, microwave photonics, spectroscopy, and optical communication systems to name a few. During the past decade, the bandwidth requirement of the customers has been growing rapidly owing to an increasing number of internet users and the inclusion of different bandwidth-intensive applications which include social networking, the voice of Internet Protocol (VoIP), video conferences, video streaming, video gaming, e-health, high definition television (HDTV), etc. Customers mainly rely on optical communication systems to address their bandwidth demands for the above-mentioned services. Similarly, the ultra-dense wavelength division multiplexing (UDWDM) technique can be efficiently used to implement the network densification in 5G and beyond 5G wireless networks. Tunable and multi-wavelength fiber lasers significantly reduce the cost and complexity of the DWDM system which requires multiple laser sources. Moreover, these fiber lasers can be easily integrated with optical access networks. Therefore the development of novel L+U band fiber lasers has been recognized as an important step to achieve successful deployment of 5G and beyond 5G networks. The proposed research aims to deploy Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) based filters in the semiconductor-based gain media of the laser cavity to realize widely tunable and multiwavelength fiber lasers in the L and U bands. The stability of the proposed lasers in terms of power and wavelength fluctuations over a longer duration will also be carried out. The complete prototype of the lasers will be built in-house and tested for possible deployment in the field.