High-power neodymium soliton fiber laser that uses a chirped fiber grating

Abstract

The use of a highly chirped fiber Bragg grating for dispersion compensation in a self-starting passively mode-locked neodymium soliton fiber laser is demonstrated for the first time to our knowledge. By employing an appropriately designed saturable absorber as the mode-locking element and limiting polarization-dependent loss in the cavity, we obtain polarization-insensitive operation of the laser, and no intracavity polarization controllers are required for its optimization. The laser generated bandwidth-limited pulses of 6-ps duration with output energies as high as 1.25 nJ.