High-power soliton fiber laser based on pulse width control with chirped fiber Bragg gratings.

Chirped fiber Bragg gratings control the pulse width and energy in Kerr mode-locked erbium fiber soliton lasers. We create high-energy pulses by providing large amounts of excessive negative dispersion, which increases the pulse width while keeping the nonlinearity of the cavity constant. With a chirped fiber grating of 3.4-ps(2) dispersion, 3-ps pulses with an energy content higher than 1 nJ are generated at a repetition rate of 27 MHz. By controlling the polarization state in the cavity, we obtain a tuning range from 1.550 to 1.562 mu;m.