Integrated polarization maintaining fiber polarized grating and its application in a fiber ring laser.

An integrated polarization maintaining fiber polarized Bragg grating is proposed, which achieves reflecting and polarizing functions simultaneously. This integrated polarized grating was designed to replace the traditional fiber polarizer and Bragg grating by a single fiber device, which may induce enormous performance promotion to optical fiber systems incorporating the two devices, such as fiber ring laser, some fiber sensing networks, etc. An integrated fiber polarized grating was fabricated, and the polarization states of both the reflection and transmission were measured. The temperature and strain responses were also tested which indicated sufficient stability. The integrated fiber polarized grating was then applied to the fiber ring laser, and results indicated that a robust single-longitudinal and single-polarization mode laser can be realized by utilizing this design type of integrated polarized grating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]