Abstract

In the last decade, high-energy ultrafast fiber lasers have become the keystone of numerous optical systems due to remarkable advantages stemming from their geometries [1]. Nowadays, passively mode-locked fiber lasers are thus compact and reliable alternatives to bulky femtosecond amplification systems in the 1 μm spectral region. In the 1.5 μm region, high performances can be obtained with chirped-pulse oscillators (CPO) which generate easily-compressible and highly chirped pulses owing to their large normal GVD [2]. These so-called dissipative soliton lasers routinely deliver energies of several nanojoules based on high-nonlinearity semiconductor saturable absorber mirror [2]. Among these architectures, best sources to date can generate ~750 fs pulses with 20 nJ energy based on nonlinear polarization evolution mode-locking [3]. An efficient way to achieve shorter pulse durations is to exploit the self-similar propagation regime which is favoured by the combination of normal dispersion fibers and narrowband spectral filters [4].

© 2015 IEEE