Watt-level 1.6 μm dissipative soliton ultrafast laser and external generation of ∼70 fs noise-like pulses for supercontinuum generation

Abstract

Here, we propose a high power dissipative soliton (DS) laser with a central wavelength of ∼1612 nm. The whole laser system includes the mode-locking oscillator and the corresponding master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA). The mode-locking oscillator is a nonlinear amplifier loop mirror (NALM) cavity, which has a net normal dispersion enabling the generation of nJ-level DS pulses. To further enhance the output power of the 1.6 μm DS pulses, the specially-designed MOPA system consisting of multiple-stage single-pass amplifier is constructed, which can amplify the output power to watt level and meanwhile keeps a high suppression ratio to C-band amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). This high power 1.6 μm DS laser will have further applications in biomedical research and material processing. In the amplifier, we observe the automatic evolution of the DS pulses into the noise-like (NL) pulses under high pumping strength. At the maximum pump power, the MOPA system delivers the NL pulses with an output power of over 2 W. The narrowest spike duration is ∼70 fs (fs). This 1.6 μm fs-scale NL laser is a good pump source for generating the mid-infrared supercontinuum without short wavelength region loss. To demonstrate the superiority of this NL laser, a broad supercontinuum from ∼0.87 μm to ∼3.75 μm waveband is achieved with a piece of highly germanium-doped (Ge-doped) fiber.