Random lasers are a type of lasers that lack typical resonator structures, offering benefits such as easy integration, low cost, and low spatial coherence. These features make them popular for speckle-free imaging and random number generation. However, due to their high threshold and phase instability, the production of picosecond random lasers has still been a challenge. In this work, we have developed three dyes incorporating polymer optical fibers doped with various scattering nanoparticles to produce short-pulsed random fiber lasers. Notably, stable picosecond random laser emission lasting 600 ps is observed at a low pump energy of 50 µJ, indicating the gain-switching mechanism. Population inversion and gain undergo an abrupt surge as the intensity of the continuously pumped light nears the threshold level. When the intensity of the continuously pumped light reaches a specific value, the number of inversion populations in the “scattering cavity” surpasses the threshold rapidly. Simulation results based on a model that considers power-dependent gain saturation confirmed the above phenomenon. This research helps expand the understanding of the dynamics behind random medium-stimulated emission in random lasers and opens up possibilities for mode locking in these systems.

We demonstrate single-mode microdisk lasers in the telecom band with ultralow thresholds on erbium-ytterbium co-doped thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN). The active microdisk was fabricated with high-Q factors by photolithography-assisted chemomechanical etching. Thanks to the erbium-ytterbium co-doping providing high optical gain, the ultralow loss nanostructuring, and the excitation of high-Q coherent polygon modes, which suppresses multimode lasing and allows high spatial mode overlap between pump and lasing modes, single-mode laser emission operating at 1530 nm wavelength was observed with an ultralow threshold, under a 980-nm-band optical pump. The threshold was measured as low as 1 µW, which is one order of magnitude smaller than the best results previously reported in single-mode active TFLN microlasers. The conversion efficiency reaches 4.06 × 10^-3, which is also the highest value reported in single-mode active TFLN microlasers.

All-fiber few-mode erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (FM-EDFAs) with isolation and wavelength division multiplexers (IWDMs) have been developed to enable flexible pumping in different directions. The FM-EDFA can achieve >30 dB modal gain with <0.3 dB differential modal gain (DMG). We experimentally simulate the DMG performance of a cascade FM-EDFA system using the equivalent spectrum method. The overall DMG reaches 1.84 dB after 10-stage amplification. We also build a recirculating loop to simulate the system, and the developed FM-EDFA can support transmission up to 3270 km within a 2 dB overall DMG by optimizing the few-mode fiber length in the loop.

High-power ultrafast laser amplification based on a non-polarization maintaining fiber chirped pulse amplifier is demonstrated. The active polarization control technology based on the root-mean-square propagation (RMS-prop) algorithm is employed to guarantee a linearly polarized output from the system. A maximum output power of 402.3 W at a repetition rate of 80 MHz is realized with a polarization extinction ratio (PER) of > 11.4 dB. In addition, the reliable operation of the system is verified by examining the stability and noise properties of the amplified laser. The M² factor of the laser beam at the highest output power is measured to be less than 1.15, indicating a diffraction-limited beam quality. Finally, the amplified laser pulse is temporally compressed to 755 fs with a highest average power of 273.8 W. This is the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that the active polarization control technology was introduced into the high-power ultrafast fiber amplifier.

The laser-induced damage detection images used in high-power laser facilities have a dark background, few textures with sparse and small-sized damage sites, and slight degradation caused by slight defocus and optical diffraction, which make the image superresolution (SR) reconstruction challenging. We propose a non-blind SR reconstruction method by using an exquisite mixing of high-, intermediate-, and low-frequency information at each stage of pixel reconstruction based on UNet. We simplify the channel attention mechanism and activation function to focus on the useful channels and keep the global information in the features. We pay more attention on the damage area in the loss function of our end-to-end deep neural network. For constructing a high-low resolution image pairs data set, we precisely measure the point spread function (PSF) of a low-resolution imaging system by using a Bernoulli calibration pattern; the influence of different distance and lateral position on PSFs is also considered. A high-resolution camera is used to acquire the ground-truth images, which is used to create a low-resolution image pairs data set by convolving with the measured PSFs. Trained on the data set, our network has achieved better results, which proves the effectiveness of our method.

Fast and stable phase control is essential for many applications in optics. Here, we propose an all-fiber all-optical phase modulation scheme based on a Fabry–Perot interferometer (FPI) and an Er/Yb co-doped fiber (EYDF). By using the EYDF as an F-P cavity via rational design, a phase shift with a modulation sensitivity of 0.0312π/mW is introduced to the modulator. The phase shifts in the EYDF consist of a thermal phase shift and a nonlinear phase shift with a ratio of 19:1, and the corresponding temporal responses of the modulation are 204 ms and 2.5 ms, respectively. In addition, the compact FPI is encapsulated to provide excellent stability for the modulator.