Although visible femtosecond lasers based on nonlinear frequency conversion of Ti:sapphire femtosecond oscillators or near-infrared ultrafast lasers have been well developed, limitations in terms of footprint, cost, and efficiency have called for alternative laser solutions. The fiber femtosecond mode-locked oscillator as an ideal solution has achieved great success in the 0.9 to 3.5 μm infrared wavelengths, but remains an outstanding challenge in the visible spectrum (390 to 780 nm). Here, we tackle this challenge by introducing a visible-wavelength mode-locked femtosecond fiber oscillator along with an amplifier. This fiber femtosecond oscillator emits red light at 635 nm, employs a figure-nine cavity configuration, applies a double-clad Pr^{3 +} -doped fluoride fiber as the visible gain medium, incorporates a visible-wavelength phase-biased nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (PB-NALM) for mode locking, and utilizes a pair of customized high-efficiency and high-groove-density diffraction gratings for dispersion management. Visible self-starting mode locking established by the PB-NALM directly yields red laser pulses with a minimum pulse duration of 196 fs and a repetition rate of 53.957 MHz from the oscillator. Precise control of the grating pair spacing can switch the pulse state from a dissipative soliton or a stretched-pulse soliton to a conventional soliton. In addition, a chirped-pulse amplification system built alongside the oscillator immensely boosts the laser performance, resulting in an average output power over 1 W, a pulse energy of 19.55 nJ, and a dechirped pulse duration of 230 fs. Our result represents a concrete step toward high-power femtosecond fiber lasers covering the visible spectral region and could have important applications in industrial processing, biomedicine, and scientific research.

Breathing solitons, i.e., dynamic dissipative solitons with oscillating pulse shape and energy caused by different mechanisms of spatiotemporal instabilities, have received considerable interest from the aspects of nonlinear science and potential applications. However, by far, the study of breathing solitons is still limited within the time scale of hundreds of cavity round trips, which ignores the slow dynamics. To fill this lacuna, we theoretically investigate a new type of vector dissipative soliton breathing regime and experimentally demonstrate this concept using mode-locked fiber lasers, which arise from the desynchronization of orthogonal states of polarization (SOPs) in the form of complex oscillations of the phase difference between the states. The dynamic evolution of polarization states of the vector breathings solitons takes the form of a trajectory connecting two quasi-equilibrium orthogonal SOPs on the surface of the Poincaré sphere. The dwelling time near each state is on the scale of a tenth of a thousand cavity round trip times that equals the breathing period, which is up to 2 orders of magnitude longer than that for common breathers. The obtained results can reveal concepts in nonlinear science and may unlock approaches to the flexible manipulation of laser waveforms toward various applications in spectroscopy and metrology.

随着超大容量光通信的发展，密集波分复用技术被广泛采用。该技术需要稳定的高重复频率超快脉冲序列作为信号源，若采用多个单一波长输出的锁模激光器作为激光光源，系统的成本和复杂性将显著提高；而双波长锁模激光器因具有双波长输出、脉冲持续时间短、光束质量好和可调谐范围宽等优点，可有效满足超大容量光通信所需信号源的要求。此外，该光源在光谱学、微波产生等领域也均有应用。双波长锁模光纤激光器可利用双谐振腔结构、二维材料的高非线性以及腔内滤波效应等设计实现，其中腔内滤波效应可通过在激光谐振腔内插滤波器件、多模干涉和非线性效应如非线性偏振旋转三种方式引入。目前双波长锁模光纤激光器的输出波长主要在1 μm和1.5 μm波段的光谱区域，输出功率为mW量级，未来将向实现输出中红外或更长工作波段以及瓦级输出功率方向发展。