PASSIVELY MODE-LOCKED YB-DOPED ALL POLARIZATION-MAINTAINING FIBER LASER

CUADRADO LABORDE, CHRISTIAN; CRUZ, JOSE LUIS; DIEZ, ANTONIO; CARRASCOSA, ANTONIO; ANDRES BOU, MIGUEL

Cancún

Encuentro; X Iberoamerican Optics Meeting / XIII Latinamerican Meeting on Optics, Lasers and Applications/Mexican Optics and Photonics Meeting; 2019

Traditionally, short light pulses were generated in all-anomalous fiber cavities by using soliton mode-locking. Although this is easily attainable at the erbium emission wavelength, it is not so easy when ytterbium is the choice for the medium gain; because conventional single-mode fibers have normal dispersion below 1300 nm. The first attempts to circumvent this setback involved the inclusion into the cavity of a dispersion-compensator. Therefore, making the cavity averagely anomalous, but at the expense of higher power loses --not to mention the fact that soliton mode-locking lasers are not precisely robust in its operation. Later, it was realized that all-normal dispersion (ANDi) cavities are able to deliver high-energy positively-chirped light pulses that can be further compressed out of the cavity to the sub-ps regime. Here, we present an ANDi all-polarization-maintaining passively mode-locked Yb-doped fiber laser, where the filtering action is solely performed by the (broad) gain medium. We also tested the possibility to recompress these light pulses by using a fabricated ad hoc polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber