Ultrashort-pulse fiber ring lasers

This paper reviews recent progress on ultrashort pulse generation with erbium-doped fiber ring lasers. The passive mode-locking technique of polarization additive pulse mode-locking (P-APM) is used to generate stable, self- starting, sub-500 fs pulses at the fundamental repetition rate from a unidirectional fiber ring laser operating in the soliton regime. Saturation of the APM, spectral sideband genera- tion, and intracavity filtering are discussed. Harmonic mode- locking of fiber ring lasers with soliton pulse compression is addressed, and stability regions for the solitons are mapped and compared with theoretical predictions. The stretched- pulse laser, which incorporates segments of positive- and negative-dispersion fiber into the P-APM fiber ring, gen- erates shorter (sub-100 fs) pulses with broader bandwidths (> 65 nm) and higher pulse energies (up to 2: 7n J). We dis- cuss optimization of the net dispersion of the stretched-pulse laser, use of the APM rejection port as the laser output port, and frequency doubling for amplifier seed applications. We also review the analytical theory of the stretched-pulse laser as well as discuss the excellent noise characteristics of both the soliton and stretched-pulse lasers.