Abstract

Ring cavities are attractive configurations for dye lasers because they offer the possibility of unidirectional laser operation and simplify colliding pulse mode locking. This paper describes a dye laser operating in an all-fiber ring resonator. The gain in the ring is provided by the interaction between the evanescent field of an adiabatically tapered single mode fiber and a surrounding DCM laser dye solution (see Figure 1). The high optical intensities that can be achieved at the waist of a tapered fiber have previously been used to demonstrate lasing in a fiber with pump powers of only tens of milliwatts.¹

© 1993 Optical Society of America