Compact, All-PM Fiber Integrated and Alignment-Free Ultrafast Yb:Fiber NALM Laser With Sub-Femtosecond Timing Jitter
Yuxuan Ma, Sarper Salman, Chen Li, Christoph Mahnke, Yi Hua, Stefan Droste, Jakob Fellinger, Aline S. Mayer, Oliver H. Heckl, Christoph M. Heyl, Ingmar Hartl
Abstract
We report a simple and compact design of a dispersion compensated mode-locked Yb:fiber oscillator based on a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM). The fully polarization maintaining (PM) fiber integrated laser features a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) for dispersion compensation and a fiber integrated compact non-reciprocal phase bias device, which is alignment-free. The main design parameters were determined by numerically simulating the pulse evolution in the oscillator and by analyzing their impact on the laser performance. Experimentally, we achieved an 88 fs compressed pulse duration with sub-fs timing jitter at 54 MHz repetition rate and 51 mW of output power with 5.5×10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-5</sup> [20 Hz, 1 MHz] integrated relative intensity noise (RIN). Furthermore, we demonstrate tight phase-locking of the laser's carrier-envelope offset frequency (f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ceo</sub> ) to a stable radio frequency (RF) reference and of one frequency comb tooth to a stable optical reference at 291 THz.