Stretched-pulse and solitonic operation of an all-fiber thulium/holmium-doped fiber laser.

Stretched-pulse operation of a mode-locked thulium/holmium-doped fiber laser has been demonstrated using a high numerical aperture (NA) fiber inside the laser cavity for intracavity dispersion compensation. The high NA fiber exhibits normal group-velocity dispersion allowing for the net-cavity dispersion to be positive. We experimentally investigate the laser dynamics as a function of the net-cavity dispersion, observing the transition from stretched-pulse to solitonic operation as the length of high NA fiber was reduced. In the stretched-pulse regime the laser produced pulses with a bandwidth of 30 nm and duration of 450 fs. Methods for compensating the third-order dispersion using high NA fibers are proposed.

[1]  J. Diels,et al.  Control and measurement of ultrashort pulse shapes (in amplitude and phase) with femtosecond accuracy. , 1985, Applied optics.

[2]  Hemmo Tuovinen,et al.  Dissipative dispersion-managed soliton 2 μm thulium/holmium fiber laser. , 2011, Optics letters.

[3]  Hermann A. Haus,et al.  Soliton versus nonsoliton operation of fiber ring lasers , 1994 .

[4]  Evgueni M. Dianov,et al.  Mode-locked 1.93 μm thulium fiber laser with a carbon nanotube absorber , 2008 .

[5]  Bera Palsdottir,et al.  Dispersion-compensating fibers , 2005 .

[6]  Rajesh Kadel,et al.  All-fiber passively mode-locked thulium/holmium laser with two center wavelengths. , 2012, Applied optics.

[7]  Hermann A. Haus,et al.  Stretched-Pulse Additive Pulse Mode-Locking in Fiber , 1994 .

[8]  Jörg Neumann,et al.  Ultrafast, stretched-pulse thulium-doped fiber laser with a fiber-based dispersion management. , 2012, Optics letters.

[9]  Dietmar Kracht,et al.  Pulse characteristics of a passively mode-locked thulium fiber laser with positive and negative cavity dispersion. , 2010, Optics express.

[10]  Hermann A. Haus,et al.  Broadly tunable sub‐500 fs pulses from an additive‐pulse mode‐locked thulium‐doped fiber ring laser , 1995 .

[11]  Kevin Chen,et al.  Mode-locked ultrafast Thulium fiber laser with all-fiber dispersion management , 2010, CLEO/QELS: 2010 Laser Science to Photonic Applications.

[12]  D. Kracht,et al.  Stretched-pulse operation of a thulium-doped fiber laser with a fiber-based dispersion management , 2008, 2012 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO).

[13]  Jörg Neumann,et al.  Monotonically chirped pulse evolution in an ultrashort pulse thulium-doped fiber laser. , 2012, Optics letters.

[14]  Daniel L Marks,et al.  Study of an ultrahigh-numerical-aperture fiber continuum generation source for optical coherence tomography. , 2002, Optics letters.

[15]  D. Gloge,et al.  Dispersion in weakly guiding fibers. , 1971, Applied optics.