All Polarization-Maintaining Passively Mode-Locked Yb-Doped Fiber Laser: Pulse Compression Using an Anomalous Polarization-Maintaining Photonic Crystal Fiber

• Main Authors: Christian Cuadrado-Laborde, Antonio Carrascosa, Antonio Diez, Jose L. Cruz, Miguel V. Andres
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Photonics Journal
• Subjects: Fiber laser; dissipative solitons; polarization maintaining; photonic crystal fibers.
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8848429/
• ISSN: 1943-0655

We report the generation of short pulses at 1 μm using an all-polarization-maintaining (PM) fiber configuration. The pulses are provided by an all normal-dispersion Fabry-Perot Yb-doped cavity and are compressed with an anomalous polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber (PM PCF). Opposed to standard configurations; here the filtering action is solely performed by the finite bandwidth of the gain medium. The laser generates 8 ps width sech² profile pulses at 1046.8 nm with a -10 dB bandwidth of 5.9 nm. After compression using the PM PCF, pulses with an FWHM of 3 ps were obtained, limited by the actual value of the available anomalous dispersion. We also report the changes in the output light pulses when both the net-normal dispersion of the cavity and the medium gain length were varied. We found that the lack of a specific filter within the cavity does not deteriorate the performance as compared with previous works.