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

• Published in: IEEE photonics journal 2019-12, Vol.11 (6), p.1-9
• Main Authors: Cuadrado-Laborde, Christian, Carrascosa, Antonio, Diez, Antonio, Cruz, Jose L., Andres, Miguel V.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cavity resonators; Configurations; Crystal fibers; Dispersion; dissipative solitons; Doped fibers; Fabry-Perot interferometers; Fiber laser; Fiber lasers; Laser mode locking; Optical fiber dispersion; Optical fiber polarization; photonic crystal fibers; Photonic crystals; Polarization; polarization maintaining; Pulse compression; Short pulses
• ISSN: 1943-0655; 1943-0655; 1943-0647
• DOI: 10.1109/JPHOT.2019.2943839

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 sech 2 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.