High-power side-pumped passively mode-locked Er-Yb fiber laser

A side-pumped double-clad Er-Yb fiber laser passively mode-locked with a saturable absorber is demonstrated for the first time. Pumped with a power of 1 W from a broad-stripe diode laser, an environmentally stable cavity design produces positively chirped 3-ps pulses at a repetition rate of 30 MHz with an average output power of 50 mW. The pulses can be linearly compressed to 330 fs in a length of negative dispersion fiber, whereas nonlinear compression in standard telecom fibers yields 130-fs pulses with pulse energies of 1.2 nJ