Flexible all-PM NALM Yb:fiber laser design for frequency comb applications: operation regimes and their noise properties

Abstract

We present a flexible all-polarization-maintaining (PM) mode-locked ytterbium (Yb):fiber laser based on a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM). In addition to providing detailed design considerations, we discuss the different operation regimes accessible by this versatile laser architecture and experimentally analyze five representative mode-locking states. These five states were obtained in a 78-MHz configuration at different intracavity group delay dispersion (GDD) values ranging from anomalous (-0.035 ps${}^2$) to normal (+0.015 ps${}^2$). We put a particular focus on the characterization of the intensity noise as well as the free-running linewidth of the carrier-envelope-offset (CEO) frequency as a function of the different operation regimes. We observe that operation points far from the spontaneous emission peak of Yb (~1030 nm) and close to zero intracavity dispersion can be found, where the influence of pump noise is strongly suppressed. For such an operation point, we show that a CEO linewidth of less than 10-kHz at 1 s integration can be obtained without any active stabilization.

References in corpus (2)

• Timing jitter optimization of mode-locked Yb-fiber lasers toward the attosecond regime
• Characterization of timing jitter spectra in free-running mode-locked lasers with 340 dB dynamic range over 10 decades of Fourier frequency

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