Femtosecond soliton generation in a praseodymium fluoride fiber laser

Chirped pulse amplification based on praseodymium-doped fluoride fibers

We have developed a chirped pulse amplification system for ultrashort 1300 nm pulses based on praseodymium-doped fluoride fibers (Pr:ZBLAN). The 1300 nm seed pulse is generated through soliton-dispersive wave coupling in a highly nonlinear fiber pumped by a pulse from an erbium-doped fiber laser. The seed pulse is stretched with a grating stretcher to ∼150 ps and amplified with a two-stage Pr:ZBLAN amplifier. The average power reaches ∼112 mW at the repetition rate of 40 MHz. The pulse is compressed to 225 fs by using a pair of gratings without serious phase distortion.

Generation of 1.3 µm femtosecond pulses by cascaded nonlinear optical gain modulation in phosphosilicate fiber

Nonlinear optical gain modulation (NOGM) is a simple and effective approach to generate highly coherent ultrafast pulses with a flexible wavelength. In this work, we demonstrate 34 nJ, 170 fs pulse generation at 1319 nm through a piece of phosphorus-doped fiber by two-stage cascaded NOGM with a 1064 nm pulsed pump. Beyond the experiment, numerical results show that 668 nJ, 391 fs pulses at 1.3 µm can be produced with up to 67% conversion efficiency by increasing the pump pulse energy and optimizing the pump pulse duration. This would offer an efficient method to obtain high-energy sub-picosecond laser sources for applications such as multiphoton microscopy.

1.3 µm dissipative soliton resonance generation in Bismuth doped fiber laser

In this work, a Figure-9 (F9) bismuth-doped fiber laser (BiDFL) operating in the dissipative soliton resonance (DSR) regime is presented. The 1338 nm laser used a BiDF as the active gain medium, while a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM) in an F9 configuration was employed to obtain high energy mode-locked pulses. The wave breaking-free rectangular pulse widened significantly in the time domain with the increase of the pump power while maintaining an almost constant peak power of 0.6 W. At the maximum pump power, the mode-locked laser delivered a rectangular-shaped pulse with a duration of 48 ns, repetition rate of 362 kHz and a radio-frequency signal-to-noise ratio of more than 60 dB. The maximum output power was recorded at around 11 mW with a corresponding pulse energy of 30 nJ. This is, to the best of the author's knowledge, the highest mode-locked pulse energy obtained at 1.3 μm as well as the demonstration of an NALM BiDFL in a F9 configuration.

Pulse bundles and passive harmonic mode-locked pulses in Tm-doped fiber laser based on nonlinear polarization rotation

We demonstrate the nanosecond-level pulses in Tm-doped fiber laser generated by passively harmonic mode-locking. Nonlinear polarization rotation performed by two polarization controllers (PCs) is employed to induce the self-starting harmonic mode-locking. The fundamental repetition rate of the laser is 448.8 kHz, decided by the length of the cavity. Bundles of pulses with up to 17 uniform subpulses are generated due to the split of pulse when the pump power increases and the PCs are adjusted. Continuous harmonic mode-locked pulse trains are obtained with 1st to 6th and even more than 15th order when the positions of the PCs are properly fixed and the pump power is scaled up. The widths of all the uniform individual pulses are mostly 3-5 ns, and pulse with width of 304 ns at fundamental repetition rate can also be generated by adjusting the PCs. Hysteresis phenomenon of the passively harmonic mode-locked pulses' repetition frequency versus pump power is observed. The rather wide 3dB spectral bandwidth of the pulse train (25 nm) indicates that they may resemble noise-like pulses.

Passive mode-locking of fiber ring laser at the 337th harmonic using gigahertz acoustic core resonances

We report the experimental demonstration of a passively mode-locked Er-doped fiber ring laser operating at the 337th harmonic (1.80 GHz) of the cavity. The laser makes use of highly efficient Raman-like optoacoustic interactions between the guided light and gigahertz acoustic resonances trapped in the micron-sized solid glass core of a photonic crystal fiber. At sufficient pump power levels the laser output locks to a repetition rate corresponding to the acoustic frequency. A stable optical pulse train with a side-mode suppression ratio higher than 45 dB was obtained at low pump powers (~60 mW).

Transition dynamics for multi-pulsing in mode-locked lasers

We consider experimentally and theoretically a refined parameter space in a laser system near the transition to multi-pulse modelocking. Near the transition, the onset of instability is initiated by a Hopf (periodic) bifurcation. As the cavity energy is increased, the band of unstable, oscillatory modes generates a chaotic behavior between single- and multi-pulse operation. Both theory and experiment are in good qualitative agreement and they suggest that the phenomenon is of a universal nature in mode-locked lasers at the onset of multi-pulsing from N to N +1 pulses per round trip. This is the first theoretical and experimental characterization of the transition behavior, made possible by a highly refined tuning of the gain pump level.

Interaction of a soliton with a continuous wave packet

We analyze the scattering of a soliton from a continuous wave packet of arbitrary shape in a fiber, theoretically as well as numerically. Solitons recover their original shapes and velocities after collisions and the effect of collisions is described by the change of velocities of solitons. The theoretical predictions based on a WKB-type approximation are in a good agreement with numerical results.

Acoustic effect in passively mode-locked fiber ring lasers

We present a theory of acoustically induced pulse interaction in a ring fiber laser cavity. In most cases the acoustic interaction leads to pulse bunching, but in some cases it leads to regular pulse spacing. Our results compare well with the experimental data.