## Materials and Methods  
### Large Normal Dispersion Er-Fiber Laser: State-of-the-Art and Our Contribution  
In 2006, [PERSON] et al. experimentally demonstrated for the first time the possibility and potential of normal dispersion regimes regarding the energy scaling [26]. They reported the generation of 3 \(\upmu\)J pulses that could be de-chirped to 170 fs from an \"All Normal Dispersion\" (ANDi) fiber laser based on an ytterbium-doped active fiber without any dispersive delay line or anomalous dispersion in the cavity. Further exploitation of this idea significantly increased the performances with an optimized design leading to the production of 200-fs pulses reaching the energy of 20 \(\upmu\)J from an ytterbium-doped fiber oscillator operating at 1 \(\upmu\)m wavelength [23]. This energy scaling was possible because the effect of nonlinear phase accumulation in such a regime could be compensated by a strong pulse-shaping mechanism provided by a passive spectral filter, which is also a key mechanism for the laser operations presented in this review and will be addressed later. It is worth noting that the combination of this concept with large mode-area ytterbium doped fibers has allowed to reach record pulse energies directly produced from a fiber oscillator by approaching the \(\upmu\)J level [2; 3; 4]. To generalize this method to fiber lasers emitting at \(\approx\)1550 nm, the main limitation lies in the fact that commercially available components are mainly based on normal single mode fibers, such as SMF28, OFS980, or Hi1080, which exhibit anomalous dispersion at this wavelength. In 2010, [PERSON] et al. reported high-power dissipative soliton generation from an all-normal dispersion erbium fiber oscillator [27]. The Metrocor fiber from Corning, which has an anomalous dispersion of 9.5 ps\({}^{2}\)/km, was used to build the laser cavity and the key component enabling the all-normal-dispersion design was a homemade wavelength division multiplexer (WDM) based on the Metrocor fiber. With this laser setup, they succeeded in generating 53-ps pulses with energy of 20 nJ, and the pulses could be de-chirped to 750 fs. The de-chirped pulse quality was however compromised as it exhibits a large pedestal as revealed by the auto-correlation measurements. This phenomenon is attributed to the uncompensated third-order dispersion, which is estimated to be around 0.2 ps\({}^{3}\) by simulation matching the auto-correlation (AC) trace. Later, in 2014, a self-similar Er-fiber laser drawing on this concept was demonstrated [28]. It produced high-energy (3.5 nJ) chirped pulses with a spectrum spreading from 1500 nm to 1570 nm, which could be de-chirped down to 70 fs. Most of these results have been achieved using nonlinear polarization evolution as a mode-locking mechanism in combination with a passive spectral filter. In this section, we discuss the features of a dissipative soliton laser operation at large normal dispersion and using a high nonlinearity semiconductor saturable absorber in combination with a nonlinear polarization. The typical design of our large normal dispersion oscillator, based on the principle of CPO, is schematically described in Figure 1 and in Ref. [29]. The gain medium is a piece of 1.2 m heavily erbium-doped single mode fiber (EDF), which has a mode field diameter of 4.3 \(\upmu\)m and a numerical aperture of 0.29 at \(\approx\)1550 nm. The EDF presents an unpumped peak absorption of 80 dB/m at 1530 nm, and still exhibits normal group velocity dispersion (GVD) around 1550 nm. The dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) is the main component used to introduce and optimize high normal dispersion in the oscillator. A single-mode Yb-doped fiber laser (Azur light system Inc., Pessac, France), which can supply up to 5 W optical power output, was used to pump the system through a 980/1550 WDM. A 90/10 coupler was used to extract 90% of the power out of the cavity.