Stable and uniform multiwavelength erbium-doped fiber laser using nonlinear polarization rotation

A novel and simple technique, based on nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) effect, to generate stable multiwavelength oscillations in an erbium-doped fiber laser is proposed and successfully demonstrated.The NPR effect effectively induced intensity-and wavelength-dependent loss to alleviate mode competition caused by homogeneous gain broadening in erbium-doped fibers.Up to 28-wavelength lasing operation with wavelength spacing of 0.8 nm has been achieved.The outputs had uniform power distributions, and the power fluctuation in each wavelength is smaller than 0.2 dB within a period of an hour.