All-fiber all-normal-dispersion femtosecond laser with nonlinear multimodal interference based saturable absorber

Abstract: In this letter, we demonstrate the first all-fiber all-normal dispersion ytterbium-doped oscillator with nonlinear multimodal interference based saturable absorber capable to generate ultrashort dissipative soliton pulses. Additional to functioning as a saturable absorber, the use of multimode fiber segments between single mode fibers also ensures the bandpass filtering via multimode interference reimaging necessary to obtain dissipative soliton mode-locking. The oscillator generates dissipative soliton pulses at 1030 nm with 5.8 mW average power, 5 ps duration and 44.25 MHz repetition rate. Pulses are dechirped to 276 fs via an external grating compressor. All-fiber cavity design ensures high stability and $\sim$70 dB sideband suppression is measured in RF spectrum. Numerical simulations are performed to investigate cavity dynamics and obtained results well-matched with experimental observations. The proposed cavity presents an alternative approach to achieve all-fiber dissipative soliton mode-locking with a simple and low-cost design.