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In this work a very simple continuously tunable laser based on an erbium ring cavity and a silicon wafer is presented. This laser can be tuned with very fine steps, which is a compulsory characteristic for gas sensing applications. Moreover the laser is free of mode hopping within a spectral range sufficiently wide to match one of the ro-vibrational lines of a target molecule. Here the proposed laser reached, at ∼1530 nm, a continuous tuning range of around 950 pm (>100 GHz) before mode hopping occurred, when a silicon wafer of 355 μm thickness was used. Additionally, the laser can be finely tuned with small tuning steps of

In this letter, the effects of bending losses for the development of tunable supercontinuum sources are numerically and experimentally analyzed. Here, the proposed supercontinuum source is based on a very short length segment of standard single-mode fiber (SMF-28) which was used as a nonlinear medium and it was pumped by a microchip Q-switch laser at 1064 nm. In the experimental setup, a section of the optical fiber was wrapped around a mandrel in order to induce bending losses. In addition, by changing the fiber wrapping settings of the SMF-28 the SC source spectrum was filtered at some wavelengths due to mechanical stress. Hence, the source bandwidth can be increased or decreased by selecting the fiber length and by modifying the wrapping settings. Furthermore, in this work it is described as a numerical analysis which helps to support our experimental results. This numerical analysis was based on the fourth-order Runge–Kutta in the interaction picture method and the beam propagation method.