Abstract

Tunable optical comb filters have been demonstrated to be useful in the development of multi-wavelength laser sources for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical fiber communication systems. Such filters have been implemented using fiber Bragg gratings, high-birefringence fibers and Fabry-Perot resonators.¹ In all these cases, the channel spacing of the comb filter function is fixed and in the case of the fiber Bragg grating, the spectral extent is limited. In this paper we experimentally demonstrate a tunable comb filter with adjustable channel spacing with low insertion loss, large extinction ratio and can be made polarization insensitive. This filter can easily be implemented into a fiber laser configuration for multi-wavelength operation.

© 2002 Optical Society of America