Mode-locked Fabry-Perot fiber laser using cholesteric liquid crystal mirror

Summary form only given. Recently, mode-locked erbium fiber lasers have been intensively studied as candidates for inexpensive and compact short pulse sources. In this paper we propose a novel mode-locked fiber laser utilizing the selective reflection properties of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) which acts as a circularly polarizing mirror to induce mode-locking mechanism along with the nonlinear polarization evolution (NPE) and suppresses the spatial hole burning arising in a Fabry-Perot cavity.