A tunable mode-locked erbium-doped fibre laser using a Lyot-type tuner integrated in lithium niobate

In this paper we report the realization of a tunable erbium-doped fibre laser. The intracavity tuner is a filter composed of two cascaded unbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometers, integrated in a single chip of lithium niobate. Wavelength tuning is achieved electro-optically over a range of 17 nm around 1540 nm. A phase modulator integrated in the same chip allows the tunable laser to operate in a mode-locked regime.