Femtosecond Neodymium-doped microstructure fiber laser

We demonstrate femtosecond operation of a Nd-doped mi-crostructure fiber laser. The fiber provides gain and anomalous dispersion at the lasing wavelength of 1.06 microm and enables the construction of short and simple cavity designs. The laser is passively mode-locked by the combined action of a saturable absorber mirror, fiber nonlinearity, and dispersion and produces transform limited sub-400-fs pulses with a pulse energy as high as 100 pJ.