Active Wavelength Control of Fiber Bragg Gratings: A Systematic Review of Tuning Mechanisms, Emerging Applications, and Future Frontiers

Fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) have evolved from passive sensing elements into actively programmable photonic components, enabling dynamic wavelength control across diverse applications. This review provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of active wavelength control technologies for FBGs, deliberately excluding passive sensing applications. We systematically categorize the fundamental tuning mechanisms-including mechanical, thermal, optothermal, electro-optic, nonlinear optical, and hybrid approaches-and compare their performance characteristics in terms of tuning range, speed, precision, and trade-offs. Key enhancement techniques, such as mechanical amplification, thermal packaging, femtosecond laser fabrication, and FPGA-based interrogation, are examined. The transformative impact of actively controlled FBGs is elucidated across three major application domains: tunable and narrow-linewidth fiber lasers, reconfigurable microwave photonic systems, and emerging fields including quantum information processing and biomedical imaging. A consolidated technology map visualizes the connections between enabling techniques and applications. Finally, we critically analyze core challenges-performance trade-offs, control complexity, and integration bottlenecks-and outline future research directions driven by novel materials, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies. This review offers a structured framework for understanding active FBGs as programmable photonic primitives, providing actionable insights for researchers and engineers in academia and industry.