Short cavity erbium/ytterbium fiber lasers mode-locked with a saturable Bragg reflector

We present short cavity erbium/ytterbium fiber lasers that are passively mode-locked with a saturable Bragg reflector, The lasers produce sub-500-fs pulses at fundamental cavity repetition rates as high as 300 MHz, Stable passive harmonic operation increases the repetition rate to 2.0 GHz, The mode-locking mechanism in both the normal and anomalous group velocity dispersion regimes is investigated using complete analytical and numerical models and direct comparison with the experimental results, A simple technique for accurately measuring the total cavity dispersion is presented.