All polarization-maintaining passively mode-locked Yb-doped fiber laser: pulse compression using an anomalous polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber

We report the generation of short pulses at 1 μm using an all-polarization-maintaining (PM) fiber configuration. The pulses are provided by an all normal-dispersion Fabry-Perot Yb-doped cavity and are compressed with an anomalous polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber (PM PCF). Opposed to standard configurations; here the filtering action is solely performed by the finite bandwidth of the gain medium. The laser generates 8 ps width sech2 profile pulses at 1046.8 nm with a −10 dB bandwidth of 5.9 nm. After compression using the PM PCF, pulses with an FWHM of 3 ps were obtained, limited by the actual value of the available anomalous dispersion. We also report the changes in the output light pulses when both the net-normal dispersion of the cavity and the medium gain length were varied. We found that the lack of a specific filter within the cavity does not deteriorate the performance as compared with previous works.