High average power picosecond pulse generation from a thulium-doped all-fiber MOPA system

We report a stable highly-integrated high power picosecond thulium-doped all-fiber MOPA system without using conventional chirped pulse amplification technique. The master oscillator was passively mode-locked by a SESAM to generate average power of 15 mW at a fundamental repetition rate of 103 MHz in a short linear cavity, and a uniform narrow bandwidth FBG is employed to stabilize the passively mode-locked laser operation. Two-stage double-clad thulium-doped all-fiber amplifiers were used directly to boost average power to 20.7 W. The laser center wavelength was 1962.8 nm and the pulse width was 18 ps. The single pulse energy and peak-power after the amplication were 200 nJ and 11.2 kW respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest average power ever reported for a picosecond thulium-doped all-fiber MOPA system.