Self-stabilized energy-scalable dissipative soliton fiber laser

We report on the self-stabilized dissipative-soliton laser with an energy scalability by using a semi-conductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) as the pulse stabilizer for the first time. By tailoring the fluence on the SESAM relying on the two-photon absorption effect so that its reflectivity has a negative slope with respect to the fluence, the intra-cavity pulse dynamics is self-stabilized to produce single pulses only, resulting in a 48-nJ pulse energy and an unprecedented pump-to-output power conversion efficiency of 63%. Therefore, it resolves a long standing problem of the formation of multiple pulses in high-energy mode-locked lasers and thus opens a way to build high repetition-rate oscillators with microjoules pulse energies without any external amplifiers.