High power dissipative soliton in an Erbium-doped fiber laser mode-locked with a high modulation depth saturable absorber mirror

We report on a passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser, using a high nonlinear modulation depth saturable absorber mirror, in a Fabry-Perot cavity. A segment of dispersion compensation fiber is added inside the cavity in order to build a high-positive dispersion regime. The setup produced highly chirped pulses with an energy of 1.8 nJ at a repetition rate of 33.5 MHz. Numerical simulations accurately reflect our experimental results and show that pulse-shaping in this laser could be interpreted as producing 'dissipative solitons'. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America