Dispersion-Less Picosecond Soliton Fiber Laser

Dispersion engineering has been instrumental in promoting the generation of higher energy mode-locked pulses through intracavity pulse stretching. Such an approach, which involves extra-cavity compression, often struggles to produce bell-shaped pulses. An alternative approach to generate energetic and pedestal-free pulses directly from the laser oscillator is to use dissipative effects in the near absence of dispersive effects [1], [2], which is easily accessible within fiber lasers in the multi-ps pulse regime. Mode-locked lasers generating pulses with narrow optical spectrum and pulse duration above 10 ps are advantageous for numerous applications, from nonlinear wavelength conversion and spectroscopy to laser ranging [3], [4]. This motivates the development of compact, tunable fiber laser oscillators delivering adjustable picosecond pulses in the microjoule range. In this work, we tailor intracavity picosecond pulses through spectral filtering using the framework of the recently demonstrated energy-managed soliton laser concept [5]. The present dispersion-less energy-managed mode-locked fiber laser presents a remarkable flexibility and scalability in pulse energy and duration. This work combines numerical modeling with experimental validation, using standard telecom components in the 1.5 μm telecom window, and demonstrates the generation of mode-locked pulses of up to 0.34 μJ at a fundamental repetition rate of 1.9 MHz.