Abstract
Mode-locked Yb-doped fiber lasers around 1 μm are attractive for high power applications and low noise pulse train generation. Mode-locked fiber lasers working in soliton and stretched-pulse regime outperform others in terms of the laser noise characteristics, mechanical stability and easy maintenance. However, conventional optical fibers always show a normal group velocity dispersion around 1 μm, leading to the inconvenience for necessary dispersion management. Here we show that optical microfibers having a large anomalous dispersion around 1 μm can be integrated into mode-locked Yb-doped fiber lasers with ultralow insertion loss down to −0.06 dB, enabling convenient dispersion management of the laser cavity. Besides, optical microfibers could also be adopted to spectrally broaden and to dechirp the ultrashort pulses outside the laser cavity, giving rise to a pulse duration of about 110 fs. We believe that this demonstration may facilitate all-fiber format high-performance ultrashort pulse generation at 1 μm and may find applications in precision measurements, large-scale facility synchronization and evanescent-field-based optical sensing.
Highlights
Conventional optical fibers, both Yb doped and undoped single-mode fibers (SMF), always show a normal second-order dispersion (β2) around 1 μm, because of the large normal material dispersion and the relatively weak waveguide dispersion
We show in the present work that a short piece of optical microfibers could be conveniently incorporated both inside and outside of the ultrafast Yb fiber laser cavity with ultralow insertion loss, serving multifunctionally as a dispersion management, spectrally broadening and dechirping component, and enabling a pulse duration of about 110 fs
We showed that optical microfibers with a diameter-dependent dispersion could be adopted for dispersion management required for ultrafast lasers
Summary
Conventional optical fibers, both Yb doped and undoped single-mode fibers (SMF), always show a normal second-order dispersion (β2) around 1 μm, because of the large normal material dispersion and the relatively weak waveguide dispersion. The insertion loss is relatively high so far Benefitting from their wavelength-scale dimensions and high index contrast, optical microfibers drawn from conventional optical fibers exhibit the advantages of tight optical confinement, and a high effective optical nonlinearity and a strong diameter-dependent waveguide dispersion. Benefitting from the diameter-dependent dispersion, ultralow insertion loss and easy fabrication of optical microfibers, we believe this work could provide a convenient and versatile scheme for dispersion management in ultrafast fiber lasers. This scheme is fully compatible with conventional fiber components and can be widely adopted in high-performance ultrashort pulse generation and diverse ultrashort pulse-based applications
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