All-PM dispersion-managed Tm-doped fiber laser mode-locked by the NOLM

We present a self-starting all-polarization maintaining Tm-doped fiber laser oscillator mode-locked by a Nonlinear Optical Loop Mirror (NOLM). According to our knowledge this is the first dispersion-managed Tm-doped fiber laser with NOLM constructed entirely of polarization maintaining fibers. The cavity provides a stable generation of linearly polarized, linearly chirped picosecond pulses at 1998 nm, which can be compressed by a piece of an anomalous dispersion fiber down to 688 fs. The average output power in a single pulse train regime is 200 μW at a repetition rate of 9.39 MHz.