High-energy femtosecond pulses from a dissipative soliton fiber laser.

We report the generation of sub-150 fs pulses from a passively mode-locked laser featuring a large-mode-area microstructure fiber. Reliable self-starting mode-locking is achieved using a fast semiconductor saturable absorber mirror. The laser generates 63 nJ chirped pulses at 22 MHz repetition rate for an average power of 1.4 W. The 2.2 ps output pulses are compressed outside the cavity to 150 fs.