1.5 μm low threshold, high efficiency Erbium-Raman random fiber laser

We report a low threshold, high efficiency random fiber laser with hybrid Erbium-Raman gain. The numerical analysis is made to describe the power performance of the proposed Erbium-Raman random fiber laser and reveal the high efficiency generation in this simple configuration. Thanks to the hybrid gain, the experimentally achieved laser threshold has been reduced to 60 mW. The optical conversion efficiency is of record high in the 1.5 μm regime, reaching 61.5% when pump power is 2 W. This work provides an effective way to generate high efficiency stable 1.5 μm random lasing, which could have important applications in optical fiber sensing and communication.