High-energy laser pulse with a submegahertz repetition rate from a passively mode-locked fiber laser

We demonstrate an ultralong cavity, all-fiber, all-normal-dispersion Yb-doped fiber laser that is passively mode locked by a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM). Without any discrete dispersion-compensation components or conventional spectral filters, the SESAM works together with the strongly chirped pulse and the nonlinearity induced spectrum broadening to perform a filtering-equivalent function, thus stabilizing the mode locking. The laser generates 4.3 nJ stable mode-locked pulses with a 397 kHz fundamental repetition rate at a 1068 nm central wavelength. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America