High-power passively mode-locked dissipative soliton fiber laser featuring cladding-pumped non-CVD thulium-doped fiber

in: Journal of the Optical Society of America B-Optical Physics (2015)
Gaponov, Dimitry; Dauliat, Romain; Darwich, Dia; Mansuryan, T.; Jamier, Raphael; Grimm, Stephan; Schuster, Kay; Roy, Philippe
Owing to considerable recent progress in different fields of science and technology, high-power ultrafast laser sources that emit at a wavelength of around 2 μm have been attracting increased attention. In this context, fiber-based systems have asserted their strengths and potential due to noticeable compactness and robustness, while state-of-the-art results in terms of absolute values are still lower than those obtained from ytterbium-doped fiber sources. Various amplification techniques were used to achieve either high energy or high peak power at this wavelength. Recently, 100 kW in peak power was obtained [1] with chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) & gain-switched (ns) seed pulses. In turn, a mode-locked seed oscillator used in a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) setup made it possible to reach the μJ level in pulse energy with sub-ps pulses [2,3]. Moreover, impressive results were recently demonstrated with CPA systems based on Tm-doped rod-type fibers. Sub-ps pulses were amplified to reach 152 W of average power and 4 MW of peak power [4]. To achieve a high average power directly at the output of the ultrafast oscillator, one must provide effective stretching of the pulse inside the cavity during its roundtrip. One of the regimes in which this could be carried out is the so-called dissipative solitonic (DS) regime, which demands net normal cavity dispersion. Furthermore, it has been shown that energy scaling is directly related to the absolute value of normal dispersion [5,6]. In contrast to Yb-doped sources, in which fiber chromatic dispersion is naturally normal for λ > 1.5 μm, one must use dispersion-compensating elements (either bulk or specialty-fiber-based) inside the cavity to provide such an operating regime [7]. At the wavelength range of 2 μm, the average power of a few tens of milliwatts (2.2 nJ pulse energy) was already obtained in the net normal dispersion cavity based on thulium/holmium fiber [8]. The average power measured directly at the output of a passively mode-locked thulium fiber oscillator in net normal dispersion cavities was typically on the order of a few milliwatts [9]. Recently, these parameters were considerably improved to reach close to 10 nJ of a pulse energy (hundred of milliwatts average power level) and up to 40 kW of a peak power after a pulse compression [10]. Moreover, a 100 mW average output power level was demonstrated in the setup that exploits the high-order solitonic concept [11], in which pulses of a few nanojoules provided up to 21 kW of peak power directly at the oscillator output due to their sub-ps nature. In this paper, we demonstrate the generation of high average power (185 mW) and high energy (21 nJ) picosecond pulses in the net normal dispersion cavity based on cladding-pumped Tm-doped fiber (TDF) fabricated using one of the latest glass manufacturing technologies. This process, which is referred to as REPUSIL, consists of the synthesis of doped optical glass via the sintering and vitrification of silica powder. REPUSIL-based fibers have already demonstrated the remarkable capability of fabricating efficient and homogeneous active materials [12], which makes them relevant competitors to existing methods

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