Picosecond pulse Yb-doped fiber laser based on pulse compressor of microfiber

Ultra-short pulse lasers at 1.0 m waveband have important applications in many fields such as laser processing, optical precision measurement, biomedicine etc. However, because the Yb-doped fiber laser operates in the all-normal dispersion regime, the pulse width of the laser output is usually large. Because the microfiber could provide anomalous dispersion at 1.0 m waveband by changing its size, in order to achieve ultra-short pulse the microfiber was employed as dispersion compensation device to compress the Yb-doped fiber laser pulse. In this work, the diameter and length of taper waist of the home-made microfiber were 3 m and 5 cm, respectively. The pulse width of the Yb-doped fiber laser was 37.6 ps, while it was compressed to be 8.5 ps by the microfiber. These results offer a more simple and inexpensive method for pulse compression.