Generation of 47 fs Pulses from an Er:Fiber Amplifier

Abstract

We demonstrate a self-starting erbium fiber oscillator-amplifier system based on the nonlinear polarization rotation mode-locked mechanism. The direct output pulse from the amplifier is 47 fs with an average power of 1.22 W and a repetition rate of 50 MHz, corresponding to a pulse energy of 24 nJ. The full width at half-maximum of the spectrum of the output pulses is approximately 93 nm at a central wavelength of 1572 nm so that the transform-limited pulse duration is as short as 39 fs. Due to the imperfect dispersion compensation, we compress the pulses to 47 fs in this experiment.

Self-starting all-fiber PM Er:laser mode locked by a biased nonlinear amplifying loop mirror*

“…There are three most common equivalent saturable absorbers in mode-locked fiber lasers, namely nonlinear polarization evolution (NPE), [22][23][24][25][26][27] nonlinear loop mirror (NOLM), [28,29] and nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM). [30,31] All of them could provide sub-100-fs laser pulse output from standard single-mode fibers.…”