All-fiber polarization-maintaining mode-locked laser operated at 980 nm
Svetlana S. Aleshkina, A. B. Fedotov, Dmitry A. Korobko, Dmitrii Stoliarov, Denis S. Lipatov, Vladimir V. Velmiskin, Valery Temyanko, Leonid Kotov, Regina Gumenyuk, Mikhail E. Likhachev
Abstract
For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we present an all-fiber polarization-maintaining passively mode-locked picosecond laser operated at 980 nm. The laser cavity had a ring configuration with a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror as a mode-locking element. As an active medium, we used a specially designed cladding-pumped Yb-doped fiber with reduced cladding-to-core diameter ratio. The laser was self-starting and operated in the net cavity normal dispersion regime, where a spectral profile of the gain medium acted as a filter element. By intracavity spectral filtering, we achieved about 40 dB dominance of the signal wavelength at 980 nm over 1 µm emission in a highly stable picosecond pulsed regime. The corresponding simulation was performed to extend the knowledge about laser operation.