Modular, high energy, widely-tunable ultrafast fiber source

Abstract

A modular, compact and widely tunable laser system for the efficient generation of high peak and high average power ultrashort pulses. System compactness is ensured by employing efficient fiber amplifiers, directly or indirectly pumped by diode lasers. Dispersive broadening is introduced by dispersive pulse stretching in the presence of self-phase modulation and gain, resulting in the formation of high-power parabolic pulses. In addition, dispersive broadening is also introduced by simple fiber delay lines or chirped fiber gratings. The phase of the pulses in the dispersive delay line is controlled to quartic order by the use of fibers with varying amounts of waveguide dispersion or by controlling the chirp of the fiber gratings. After amplification, the dispersively stretched pulses can be re-compressed to nearly their bandwidth limit by the implementation of another set of dispersive delay lines. A particularly compact implementation of the whole system uses fiber oscillators in conjunction with fiber amplifiers.