High average and peak power femtosecond large-pitch photonic-crystal-fiber laser

We report on the generation of high-average-power and high-peak-power ultrashort pulses from a mode-locked fiber laser operating in the all-normal-dispersion regime. As gain medium, a large-mode-area ytterbium-doped large-pitch photonic-crystal fiber is used. The self-starting fiber laser delivers 27W of average power at 50.57MHz repetition rate, resulting in 534nJ of pulse energy. The laser produces positively chirped 2ps output pulses, which are compressed down to sub-100fs, leading to pulse peak powers as high as 3.2MW.