Abstract

We report the first mode-locked, thulium-doped fiber figure-eight laser. The mode-locked oscillator produces 1.5-ps pulses with 63 pJ of pulse energy at a 10.4-MHz repetition rate with a 3-nm bandwidth at a center wavelength of 2034 nm. After amplification, the pulses are compressed to 370 fs with ~50 nJ of pulse energy. The oscillator can also operate in a square pulse regime, yielding stable pulses from ~100 ps to 20 ns long with ~100 nJ per pulse after amplification.

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