Polarization maintaining linear cavity Er-doped fiber femtosecond laser

We present a polarization-maintaining (PM) type of Er-doped fiber linear oscillator designed to produce femtosecond laser pulses with high operational stability. Mode locking is activated using a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) attached to one end of the linear PM oscillator. To avoid heat damage, the SESAM is mounted on a copper-silicon-layered heat sink and connected to the linear oscillator through a fiber buffer dissipating the residual pump power. A long-term stability test is performed to prove that the proposed oscillator design maintains a soliton-mode single-pulse operation without breakdown of mode locking over a week period. With addition of an Er-doped fiber amplifier, the output power is raised to 180 mW with 60 fs pulse duration, from which an octave-spanning supercontinuum is produced.