Abstract

In the 2.5 years since their first demonstration,¹ passively mode locked all-fiber erbium lasers have been widely studied as sources of femtosecond pulses, with several groups reporting 300 fs pulses shortly after the initial demonstration.² The Er:silica gain bandwidth of ~40 nm should, however, support pulses as short as ~65 fs. It has recently become evident that the dispersion and the discrete construction of the cavity play important roles in the evolution of ultrashort pulses in these systems: Anomalous fiber dispersion tends to produce soliton-like pulses, white the periodic perturbation by the loss and gain causes the pulse to shed energy into a so-called dispersive wave.

© 1993 Optical Society of America