We integrally demonstrate 2 μm mode-locked pulses performances in all-fiber net anomalous dispersion cavity. Stable mode-locking operations with the center wavelength around 1950-1980 nm can be achieved by using the nonlinear polarization rotation structure and properly designing the dispersion management component. Conventional soliton is firstly obtained with a total anomalous dispersion cavity. Due to the contribution of commercial ultra-high numerical aperture fibers, net dispersion is reduced to -0.077 ps2. So that stretched pulse with 19.4 nm optical bandwidth is obtained and the de-chirped pulse-width can reach 312 fs using extra-cavity compression. Under pump power greater than 890 mW, stretched pulse can evolve into noise-like pulse with 41.3 nm bandwidth. The envelope and peak of such broadband pulse can be compressed with up to 2.2 ps and 145 fs, respectively. The single pulse energy of largely chirped stretched and noise-like pulse can reach 1.785 nJ and 1.53 nJ, respectively. Furthermore, extra-cavity compression can also contribute to a significant increase of peak power.

During the last decades the whispering gallery mode based sensors have become a prominent solution for label-free sensing of various physical and chemical parameters. At the same time, the widespread utilization of the approach is hindered by the restricted applicability of the known configurations for ambient variations quantification outside the laboratory conditions and their low affordability, where necessity on the spectrally-resolved data collection is among the main limiting factors. In this paper we demonstrate the first realization of an affordable whispering gallery mode sensor powered by deep learning and multi-resonator imaging at a fixed frequency. It has been shown that the approach enables refractive index unit (RIU) prediction with an absolute error at 3×10-6 level for dynamic range of the RIU variations from 0 to 2×10-3 with temporal resolution of several milliseconds and instrument-driven detection limit of 3×10-5. High sensing accuracy together with instrumental affordability and production simplicity places the reported detector among the most cost-effective realizations of the whispering gallery mode approach. The proposed solution is expected to have a great impact on the shift of the whole sensing paradigm away from the model-based and to the flexible self-learning solutions.

Artificial microstructures, which allow us to control and change the properties of wave fields through changing the geometrical parameters and the arrangements of microstructures, have attracted plenty of attentions in the past few decades. Some artificial microstructure based research areas, such as metamaterials, metasurfaces and phononic topological insulators, have seen numerous novel applications and phenomena. The manipulation of different dimensions (phase, amplitude, frequency or polarization) of wave fields, particularly, can be easily achieved at subwavelength scales by metasurfaces. In this review, we focus on the recent developments of wave field manipulations based on artificial microstructures and classify some important applications from the viewpoint of different dimensional manipulations of wave fields. The development tendency of wave field manipulation from single-dimension to multidimensions provides a useful guide for researchers to realize miniaturized and integrated optical and acoustic devices.