130 mW average power, 4.6 nJ pulse energy, 10.2 ps pulse duration from an Er3+ fiber oscillator passively mode locked by a resonant saturable absorber mirror

An Er3+ fiber laser passively mode locked by a resonant saturable absorber mirror achieves more than 130mW average power at 1560nm from a Fabry-Perot cavity. The pulsed regime is self-starting from the CW regime without any Q-switch transition. The output pulse has a duration of 10: 2 ps and can be extracavity dechirped with 42% efficiency down to 614 fs, which represents 1.2 times the Fourier limit imposed by the spectrum. To date, this corresponds to the highest averaged power directly extracted at such a wavelength from a fiber laser mode locked with a saturable absorber mirror. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America