Investigation of dispersion-managed, all-polarization-maintaining-fiber Yb-doped laser mode-locked by nonlinear polarization evolution

We report a dispersion-management mode-locked Yb-doped fiber laser utilizing all-polarization-maintaining (PM) components and cross-splicing method, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first report about dispersion management mode-locking with this approach. The compact linear cavity is constructed with a chirped fiber Bragg grating for dispersion-management, and nonlinear polarization evolution based on all PM fiber structured artificial saturable absorber as nonlinear mode-locking mechanism, delivering 1.855 mW average power output pulses with 3dB spectral bandwidth of 25.18 nm centered at 1031 nm. The stable pulse train had a repetition rate of 6.14 MHz and pulse duration was 7.01 ps which could be further compressed to 179.6 fs. The net dispersion of the cavity is adjusted by changing lengths of the single mode fiber in the cavity from anomalous dispersion to normal dispersion. We have obtained different features of pulses, which distinguished in spectral shapes and time traces. In the meantime, we discuss the nonlinear characteristics of this saturable absorbers theoretically and provide a theoretical basis for further improving the mode-locked fiber lasers.

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