Generation of microseconds-duration square pulses in a passively mode-locked fiber laser

An ultra-wide tunable square pulse operating in dissipative soliton resonance (DSR) region has been experimentally investigated in a passively mode-locked figure-of-eight fiber laser. In our experiment, by simply increasing the pump power, the pulse width can be tuned in an ultra-wide range from 135 ns to 2272 ns without wave-breaking while the peak power remains almost constant. The maximum output single pulse energy is 236.8 nJ at the pump power of 508 mW. A 960 m highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) is employed to realize widely tunable square pulse in the DSR region. To the best of our knowledge, this is the widest tunable range of pulse width in any all-fiber passively mode-locked fiber laser.