Generation of 47fs Pulses from an Er:Fiber Amplifier

We demonstrate a self-starting erbium fiber oscillator-amplifier system based on the nonlinear polarization rotation mode-locked mechanism. The direct output pulse from the amplifier is 47 fs with an average power of 1.22 W and a repetition rate of 50 MHz, corresponding to a pulse energy of 24 nJ. The full width at half-maximum of the spectrum of the output pulses is approximately 93 nm at a central wavelength of 1572 nm so that the transform-limited pulse duration is as short as 39 fs. Due to the imperfect dispersion compensation, we compress the pulses to 47 fs in this experiment.