Dissipative solitons in a passively mode-locked Er-doped fiber with strong normal dispersion

We report on ultrashort pulse generation from a passively mode-locked erbium fiber laser operating in the highly positive dispersion regime. Highly-chirped pulses with 5.3 ps duration and spectral bandwidth of 8.3 nm are generated. They are extra-cavity compressed down to 757 fs. Numerical simulations confirm the experimental results and show that these pulses could be interpreted as dissipative solitons. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America