Ultrawide tunable Er soliton fiber laser amplified in Yb-doped fiber

All-fiber design of hybrid Er-doped laser/Yb-doped amplifier system for high-power ultrashort pulse generation

We propose a design of an all-fiber laser system that combines the most advanced Er:fiber laser in the telecommunication range and an efficient Yb-doped amplifier for generation of high-power ultrashort pulses. The system is based on nonlinear wavelength conversion of 1.56 μm ultrashort Er:fiber laser pulses to the 1 μm range in a short pigtail of dispersion-shifted silica fiber with subsequent amplification in the Yb-doped fiber amplifier. Pulses with a duration as short as 85 fs and averaged power of 200 mW are demonstrated.

Wavelength-tunable few-cycle optical pulses directly from an all-fiber Er-doped laser setup

A simple design, which we believe to be the first of its kind, of an all-fiber-based optical source is proposed for the generation of widely tunable few-cycle pulses as short as 20-25 fs duration in the range of 1.6-2.1 microm. Few-cycle pulses are obtained by compression of femtosecond pulses from the erbium-doped fiber laser in a three-stage scheme that uses (i) the effects of the soliton compression and the Raman frequency tuning in the dispersion decreasing fiber, as well as (ii) supercontinuum generation in a high-nonlinear silica fiber, and (iii) subsequent compression in a short conventional fiber.

Compact tunable high power picosecond source based on Yb-doped fiber amplification of gain switch laser diode

A compact tunable high power picosecond source based on Yb-doped fiber amplification of gain switch laser diode is demonstrated. A multi-stage single mode Yb-doped fiber preamplifier was combined with a single mode double-clad Yb-doped fiber main amplifier to construct the amplification system, which is seeded by a gain switch laser diode. By optimizing preamplifier???s parameters to compensate the seed spectrum gain, a "flat top" broadband spectrum is obtained to realize wavelength tunable output with a self-made tunable filter. The tunable pulses were further amplified to 3.5 W average power 90 ps pulses at 1 MHz repetition rate, and the center wavelength was tunable in the ranges from 1053 nm to 1073 nm with excellent beam quality.

Soliton Self-Frequency Shift: Experimental Demonstrations and Applications

Soliton self-frequency shift (SSFS), a consequence of Raman self-pumping that continuously red-shifts a soliton pulse, has been widely studied recently for applications to fiber-based sources and signal processing. In this paper, the fundamentals of SSFS are reviewed. Various fiber platforms for SSFS (single-mode fiber, microstructured fiber, and higher order mode fiber) are presented and experimental SSFS demonstrations in these fibers are discussed. Observation of Cerenkov radiation in fibers exhibiting SSFS is also presented. A number of interesting applications of SSFS, such as wavelength-agile lasers, analog-to-digital conversion, and slow light, are briefly discussed.

Demonstration of soliton self-frequency shift below 1300 nm in higher-order mode, solid silica-based fiber

We demonstrate soliton self-frequency shift of more than 12% of the optical frequency in a higher-order mode solid, silica-based fiber below 1300nm. This new class of fiber shows great promise for supporting Raman-shifted solitons below 1300nm in intermediate energy regimes of 1 to 10nJ that cannot be reached by index-guided photonic crystal fibers or air-core photonic bandgap fibers. By changing the input pulse energy of 200fs pulses from 1.36 to 1.63nJ we observe Raman-shifted solitons between 1064 and 1200nm with up to 57% power conversion efficiency and compressed output pulse widths less than 50fs. Furthermore, due to the dispersion characteristics of the HOM fiber, we observe redshifted Cerenkov radiation in the normal dispersion regime for appropriately energetic input pulses.

Programmable select multiwavelength gigahertz Raman soliton pulse generation

The generation of programmable multiwavelength pulses based on the self-frequency shift of a Raman soliton is demonstrated. The approach produces tunable multiwavelength picosecond pulses. Only select multiwavelength signals with a tuning range of approximately 50 nm are generated with a repetition rate of 9.95 GHz at each wavelength channel. A bit error rate (BER) of better than 1 x 10(-9) was successfully obtained for all the measured multiwavelength Raman soliton pulses. Furthermore, it was found that the signal has an excellent relative intensity noise (RIN) of better than -135.5 dBc/Hz. The BER and RIN measurements show that the frequency-shifted Raman soliton pulses are promising for use in measurement systems, optical gating, signal processing, and wavelength routing optical packet networks with the ability to provide 1:1 communication and 1:N multicasting.

Widely tunable femtosecond soliton pulse generation at a 10-GHz repetition rate by use of the soliton self-frequency shift in photonic crystal fiber

We demonstrate a soliton self-frequency shift of approximately 120 nm in a fiber with 1.56-microm pulses generated at a 10-GHz repetition rate by an actively mode-locked laser. A highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber with a length of only 12.6 m and a nonlinear coefficient of 62 W(-1) km(-1) is used to achieve such broadband operation. The wavelengths of the resulting sub-300-fs solitons can be tuned effectively by adjusting the input power. The maximum output power of the solitons exceeds 200 mW.

Broad-spectrum frequency comb generation and carrier-envelope offset frequency measurement by second-harmonic generation of a mode-locked fiber laser

A frequency comb spanning more than one octave has been achieved by injecting the second-harmonic generation (780 nm) of a mode-locked fiber laser (1.56 microm) into a photonic crystal fiber. We propose and realize a novel interferometric scheme for observing the carrier-envelope offset frequency of the frequency comb. Frequency noise has been observed on the measured carrier-envelope offset frequency, which has been confirmed to be generated in the photonic crystal fiber by comparing the measured beat frequencies between cw lasers and frequency combs before and after the photonic crystal fiber. The mode-locked fiber laser is considered to be an important candidate for the light source used in realizing a compact optical frequency measurement system including applications in the telecommunication bands.

Practical all-fiber source of high-power, 120-fs pulses at 1 micrometre

Amplification of femtosecond pulses at 1.03 micrometre in a standard Yb-doped single-mode fiber is reported. A pulse energy of 8 nJ and an average power of 400 mW are obtained, limited by available pump power. To our knowledge these are the highest pulse energy and average power obtained from an integrated, single-mode fiber amplifier. After dechirping, 120-fs, 6-nJ pulses are obtained. A practical fiber-based source with performance comparable with that of a bulk solid-state laser is thus demonstrated, and scaling to substantially higher powers will be possible.

Generation of high-energy femtosecond pulses in multimode-core Yb-fiber chirped-pulse amplification systems

220-fs pulses with energies of ~100microJ have been generated by use of two different configurations of diode-pumped Yb-fiber chirped-pulse amplification systems. Energy scaling was demonstrated with 25-microm -core diameter fibers, in which stable diffraction-limited output (M(2)~1.1) was achieved. A two-stage fiber-amplifier system produced average powers of up to 5.5 W at ~1- MHz pulse-repetition rate. A double-pass configuration provided 53-dB gain in a single Yb-fiber amplifier stage, thus eliminating the necessity for multiple amplification stages as well as the need for using polarization-preserving fibers.

Soliton self-frequency shift in a short tapered air-silica microstructure fiber

We report a soliton self-frequency shift of more than 20% of the optical frequency in a tapered air-silica microstructure fiber that exhibits a widely flattened large anomalous dispersion in the near infrared. Remarkably, the large frequency shift was realized in a fiber of length as short as 15 cm, 2 orders of magnitude shorter than those reported previously with similar input pulse duration and pulse energies, owing to the small mode size and the large and uniform dispersion in the tapered fiber. By varying the power of the input pulses, we generated compressed sub-100-fs soliton pulses of ~1-nJ pulse energy tunable from 1.3 to 1.65 mum with greater than 60% conversion efficiency.

Self-similar propagation and amplification of parabolic pulses in optical fibers

Ultrashort pulse propagation in high gain optical fiber amplifiers with normal dispersion is studied by self-similarity analysis of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with gain. An exact asymptotic solution is found, corresponding to a linearly chirped parabolic pulse which propagates self-similarly subject to simple scaling rules. The solution has been confirmed by numerical simulations and experiments studying propagation in a Yb-doped fiber amplifier. Additional experiments show that the pulses remain parabolic after propagation through standard single mode fiber with normal dispersion.