Pulse bundles and passive harmonic mode-locked pulses in Tm-doped fiber laser based on nonlinear polarization rotation

We demonstrate the nanosecond-level pulses in Tm-doped fiber laser generated by passively harmonic mode-locking. Nonlinear polarization rotation performed by two polarization controllers (PCs) is employed to induce the self-starting harmonic mode-locking. The fundamental repetition rate of the laser is 448.8 kHz, decided by the length of the cavity. Bundles of pulses with up to 17 uniform subpulses are generated due to the split of pulse when the pump power increases and the PCs are adjusted. Continuous harmonic mode-locked pulse trains are obtained with 1st to 6th and even more than 15th order when the positions of the PCs are properly fixed and the pump power is scaled up. The widths of all the uniform individual pulses are mostly 3-5 ns, and pulse with width of 304 ns at fundamental repetition rate can also be generated by adjusting the PCs. Hysteresis phenomenon of the passively harmonic mode-locked pulses' repetition frequency versus pump power is observed. The rather wide 3dB spectral bandwidth of the pulse train (25 nm) indicates that they may resemble noise-like pulses.