A High-Energy, Wide-Spectrum, Spatiotemporal Mode-Locked Fiber Laser

In this article, we demonstrate a high-energy, wide-spectrum, spatiotemporal mode-locked (STML) fiber laser. Unlike traditional single-mode fiber lasers, STML fiber lasers theoretically enable mode-locking with various combinations of transverse modes. The laser can deliver two different STML pulse sequences with different pulse widths, spectra and beam profiles, due to the different compositions of transverse modes in the output pulses. Moreover, we achieve a wide-spectrum pulsed output with a single-pulse energy of up to 116 nJ, by weakening the spectral filtering and utilizing self-cleaning. Strong spatial and spectral filtering are usually thought to be necessary for achieving STML. Our experiment verifies the necessity of spatial filtering for achieving STML, and we show that weakening unnecessary spectral filtering provides an effective way to increase the pulse energy and spectrum width of mode-locked fiber lasers.