Scaling of dissipative soliton fiber lasers to megawatt peak powers by use of large-area photonic crystal fiber.

We report an all-normal dispersion femtosecond laser based on large-mode-area Yb-doped photonic crystal fiber. Self-starting mode-locked pulses are obtained with an average power of 12 W at 84 MHz repetition rate, corresponding to 140 nJ of chirped pulse energy. These are dechirped to a near transform-limited duration of 115 fs. Experimental results are consistent with numerical simulations of dissipative soliton intra-cavity pulse evolution, and demonstrate scaling of 100 fs pulses to megawatt peak powers.

Generation of sub-50 fs pulses from a high-power Yb-doped fiber amplifier.

We demonstrate the generation of 48 fs pulses with 18 W average power and 226 nJ of pulse energy from a Yb-doped fiber amplifier. The system uses a simple stretcher-free single-stage amplifier configuration operating in the parabolic pulse regime. The gain fiber length and pump wavelength are chosen in order to reduce the gain per unit length and generate both shorter pulses and higher pulse energy.