Technique for obtaining high-energy ultrashort pulses from an additive-pulse mode-locked erbium-doped fiber ring laser

We report a self-starting stretched-pulse polarization additive-pulse mode-locked erbium-doped fiber ring laser with high output power. By using the light normally absorbed by the intracavity polarizer as the output, we obtained pulses with energies greater than 0.5 nJ at a repetition rate of 48 MHz. External chirp compensation was used to shorten the highly chirped output pulses to durations of less than 100 fs. The power levels suggest that erbium-doped fiber lasers may replace bulk solid-state lasers, such as the color-center laser, for some applications.