Scaling of dissipative soliton fiber lasers to megawatt peak powers by use of large-area photonic crystal fiber

We report an all-normal dispersion femtosecond laser based on large-mode-area Yb-doped photonic crystal fiber. Self-starting mode-locked pulses are obtained with an average power of 12 W at 84 MHz repetition rate, corresponding to 140 nJ of chirped pulse energy. These are dechirped to a near transform-limited duration of 115 fs. Experimental results are consistent with numerical simulations of dissipative soliton intra-cavity pulse evolution, and demonstrate scaling of 100 fs pulses to megawatt peak powers. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America