All-fiber polarization-maintaining erbium-doped dispersion-managed fiber laser based on a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror.

In this paper, we build a mode-locked all-polarization-maintaining figure-of-8 erbium-doped fiber oscillator based on a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror. The fiber oscillator can generate 1.6 ps chirped pulses that can be de-chirped to 500 fs at 1550 nm with a pulse energy of 0.8 nJ and a repetition rate of 12 MHz. It can be further amplified up to 10 nJ and compressed down to 100 fs with a pre-chirp managed nonlinear amplification setup. Such an oscillator and amplifier configuration has the advantages of self-starting and long-term operation, and it is highly suitable for subsequent frequency conversion, which is desirable for many applications in ultrafast microscopy and precision spectroscopy.