Similariton fiber laser with a hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber for dispersion control.

We report on an ytterbium-doped similariton fiber ring laser with a hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber for intracavity dispersion control. The oscillator is hybrid mode locked. with a saturable Bragg reflector and by nonlinear polarization evolution. This scheme allows for an exact adjustment of the transmission characteristic to avoid the formation of bunched noiselike pulses while the self-starting characteristic is preserved. The oscillator generates highly stretched similaritons at 1025 mn with a pulse energy above 1 nJ at a repetition rate of 21.9 MHz. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.