Gilles Martel

We report on ultrashort pulse generation from a passively modelocked erbium fiber laser operating in the highly positive dispersion regime. Highly-chirped pulses with 5.3 ps duration and spectral bandwidth of 8.3 nm are generated. They are extra-cavity compressed down to 757 fs. Numerical simulations confirm the experimental results and show that these pulses could be interpreted as dissipative solitons.

On the basis of numerical simulations, we explain the formation of the stable bound soliton pairs that were experimentally reported in a high-power mode-locked ytterbium fiber laser [Opt. Express 14, 6075 (2006) ], in a regime where wave-breaking-free operation is expected. A fully vectorial model allows one to rigorously reproduce the nonmonotonic nature for the nonlinear polarization effect that generally limits the power scalability of a single-pulse self-similar regime. Simulations show that a self-similar regime is not fully obtained, although positive linear chirps and parabolic spectra are always reported. As a consequence, nonvanishing pulse tails allow distant stable binding of highly-chirped pulses.