All-fiber similariton laser at 1 μm without dispersion compensation

We report on an all-fiber femtosecond Ytterbium laser without dispersion compensation operating in the similariton pulse regime. The oscillator was mode-locked with a saturable Bragg reflector along with nonlinear polarization evolution. A pulse energy of 0.8 nJ was achieved with a pulse duration of 10 ps. The pulses could be externally dechirped to 627 fs which was within 8.7% of the Fourier transform limited pulse duration. The realized oscillator combines compact size, high stability and alignment-free operation. (C) 2007 Optical Society of America.