Self-starting self-similar all-polarization maintaining Yb-doped fiber laser

We report on the generation of self-similar pulses from an self-starting saturable absorber mirror (SAM) based environmentally stable fiber laser comprising only polarization maintaining (PM) fibers. Pulse energies of 1 nJ at a repetition rate of 17 MHz were obtained, which could be externally compressed to an autocorrelation width of 280 fs.