Compact, all-PM fiber integrated and alignment-free ultrafast Yb:fiber NALM laser with sub-femtosecond timing jitter

TL;DR

This paper presents a compact, all-PM fiber laser design that achieves ultrafast pulses with sub-femtosecond timing jitter, using a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror and dispersion compensation techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a fully polarization maintaining, alignment-free fiber laser with integrated dispersion compensation and phase bias, demonstrating ultrafast pulse generation with stable frequency comb locking.

Findings

88 fs pulse duration achieved

Sub-femtosecond timing jitter demonstrated

Stable phase-locking of fceo and optical reference

Abstract

We report a simple and compact design of a dispersion compensated mode-locked Yb:fiber oscillator based on a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM). The fully polarization maintaining (PM) fiber integrated laser features a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) for dispersion compensation and a fiber integrated compact non-reciprocal phase bias device, which is alignment-free. The main design parameters were determined by numerically simulating the pulse evolution in the oscillator and by analyzing their impact on the laser performance. Experimentally, we achieved an 88 fs compressed pulse duration with sub-fs timing jitter at 54 MHz repetition rate and 51 mW of output power with 5.5 * 10-5 [20 Hz, 1 MHz] integrated relative intensity noise (RIN). Furthermore, we demonstrate tight phase-locking of the laser's carrier-envelope offset frequency (fceo) to a stable radio frequency (RF) reference and of one frequency comb tooth to a stable optical reference at 291 THz.