In this Letter, we demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first spatiotemporally mode-locked fiber laser with self-similar pulse evolution. The multimode fiber oscillator generates parabolic amplifier similaritons at 1030 nm with 90 mW average power, 2.3 ps duration, and 37.9 MHz repetition rate. Remarkably, we observe experimentally a near-Gaussian beam quality (M 2 <1.4) at the output of the highly multimode fiber. The output pulses are compressed to 192 fs via an external grating compressor. Numerical simulations are performed to investigate the cavity dynamics which confirm experimental observations of selfsimilar pulse propagation. The reported results open a new direction to investigate new types of pulse besides beam shaping and nonlinear dynamics in spatiotemporal mode-locked fiber lasers.
The performance of fiber mode-locked lasers is limited due to the high nonlinearity induced by the spatial confinement of the single-mode fiber core. To massively increase the pulse energy of the femtosecond pulses, amplification is performed outside the oscillator. Recently, spatiotemporal mode-locking has been proposed as a new path to fiber lasers. However, the beam quality was highly multimode, and the calculated threshold pulse energy (>100 nJ) for nonlinear beam self-cleaning was challenging to realize. We present an approach to reach high energy per pulse directly in the mode-locked multimode fiber oscillator with a near single-mode output beam. Our approach relies on spatial beam self-cleaning via the nonlinear Kerr effect, and we demonstrate a multimode fiber oscillator with M 2 < 1.13 beam profile, up to 24 nJ energy, and sub-100 fs compressed duration. Nonlinear beam self-cleaning is verified both numerically and experimentally for the first time in a mode-locked multimode laser cavity. The reported approach is further power scalable with larger core sized fibers up to a certain level of modal dispersion and could benefit applications that require high-power ultrashort lasers with commercially available optical fibers.
In this Letter, we demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first all-fiber all-normal-dispersion ytterbium-doped oscillator with a nonlinear multimodal interference-based saturable absorber capable of generating ultrashort dissipative soliton pulses. Additional to functioning as a saturable absorber, the use of multimode fiber segments between single-mode fibers also ensures the bandpass filtering via multimode interference reimaging necessary to obtain dissipative soliton mode locking. The oscillator generates dissipative soliton pulses at 1030 nm with 5.8 mW average power, 5 ps duration, and 44.25 MHz repetition rate. Pulses are dechirped to 276 fs via an external grating compressor. All-fiber cavity design ensures high stability, and ∼70 dB sideband suppression is measured in the radio frequency spectrum. Numerical simulations are performed to investigate cavity dynamics, and obtained results are well matched with experimental observations. The proposed cavity presents an alternative approach to achieve all-fiber dissipative soliton mode locking with a simple and low-cost design.
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