Sulaiman Wadi HARUN, Nizam TAMCHEK, Mohd Kamil ABD-RAHMAN, Prabakaran POOPALAN and Harith AHMAD

Department of Physics, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

(Received February 22, 2002; Accepted January 27, 2003)

A multiwavelength Brillouin / erbium fibre laser (BEFL) which operates in the long wavelength (L-band) region is demonstrated for potential applications in an L-band wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) communication system. The laser configuration consists of a long erbium-doped fibre to enable L-band amplification where two 3-dB couplers take a portion of the generated BEFL signal and re-inject it into the single mode fibre to seed a cascaded BEFL line in the same direction as the first BEFL line. A stable and strong laser comb of up to five lines with 10-GHz spacing has been obtained with a Brillouin pump (BP) of 9.2 mW and a 980 nm pump of 92 mW. The BEFL has shown a broad tuning range with a tuning characteristic for line #1 which is flat over a range greater than 9.9 nm.

Key words: optical fibre devices, optical fibre lasers, L-band, Brillouin scattering, optical fibre amplifier