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An investigation on the temperature dependence of spectroscopic parameters of trivalent thulium ions is important for the design of high-power, thulium-doped fiber lasers and amplifiers. In this Letter, the thulium absorption/emission cross sections are determined in the spectral range 700–2200 nm and in the temperature range from −196°C to 300°C. The spectra are obtained from the absorption and emission measurements of a thulium-doped fiber and from measured thulium concentration profiles. Attempts were made to estimate the temperature dependence of the spectra where the measurements are not accessible. Firstly, the spectra are fitted to a multi-Gaussian model with temperature dependent parameters. Secondly, a physically motivated model of the cross section spectra is proposed and analyzed.

We present a high-power source of broadband terahertz (THz) radiation covering the whole THz spectral region (0.1–30 THz). The two-color gas plasma generation process is driven by a state-of-the-art ytterbium fiber chirped pulse amplification system based on coherent combination of 16 rod-type amplifiers. Prior to the THz generation, the pulses are spectrally broadened in a multipass cell and compressed to 37 fs with a pulse energy of 1.3 mJ at a repetition rate of 500 kHz. A gas-jet scheme has been employed for the THz generation, increasing the efficiency of the process to 0.1%. The air-biased coherent detection scheme is implemented to characterize the full bandwidth of the generated radiation. A THz average power of 640 mW is generated, which is the highest THz average power achieved to date. This makes this source suitable for a variety of applications, e.g., spectroscopy of strongly absorbing samples or driving nonlinear effects for the studies of material properties.

In this Letter, we report on the generation of 1060 W average power from an ultrafast thulium-doped fiber chirped pulse amplification system. After compression, the pulse energy of 13.2 μJ with a pulse duration of 265 fs at an 80 MHz pulse repetition rate results in a peak power of 50 MW spectrally centered at 1960 nm. Even though the average heat-load in the fiber core is as high as 98 W/m, we confirm the diffraction-limited beam quality of the compressed output. Furthermore, the evolution of the relative intensity noise with increasing average output power has been measured to verify the absence of transversal mode instabilities. This system represents a new average power record for thulium-doped fiber lasers (1150 W uncompressed) and ultrashort pulse fiber lasers with diffraction-limited beam quality, in general, even considering single-channel ytterbium-doped fiber amplifiers.

High-average power laser sources delivering intense few-cycle pulses in wavelength regions beyond the near infrared are promising tools for driving the next generation of high-flux strong-field experiments. In this work, we report on nonlinear pulse compression to 34.4 μJ-, 2.1-cycle pulses with 1.4 GW peak power at a central wavelength of 1.82 μm and an average power of 43 W. This performance level was enabled by the combination of a high-repetition-rate ultrafast thulium-doped fiber laser system and a gas-filled antiresonant hollow-core fiber.

The combination of high-repetition-rate ultrafast thulium-doped fiber laser systems and gas-based nonlinear pulse compression in waveguides offers promising opportunities for the development of high-performance few-cycle laser sources at 2 μm wavelength. In this Letter, we report on a nonlinear pulse compression stage delivering 252 μJ, sub-50 fs-pulses at 15.4 W of average power. This performance level was enabled by actively mitigating ultrashort pulse propagation effects induced by the presence of water vapor absorptions.

In this Letter, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the largest effective single-mode fiber reported to date. The employed waveguide is a passive large pitch fiber (LPF), which shows the core area scaling potential of such a fiber structure. In particular, we achieved stable single-transverse mode transmission at a wavelength of 1.03 μm through a straight passive LPF with a pitch of 140 μm, resulting in a measured mode-field diameter of 205 μm.

Tm-based fiber-laser systems are an attractive concept for the development of high-performance laser sources in the spectral region around 2 μm wavelength. Here we present a system delivering a pulse-peak power higher than 200 MW in combination with 24 W average power and 120 μJ pulse energy. Key components enabling this performance level are a Tm-doped large-pitch fiber with a mode-field diameter of 65 μm, highly efficient dielectric gratings, and a Tm-based fiber oscillator operating in the stretched-pulse regime.

This Letter reports on a fiber-laser system that, employing a 1 m long rod-type photonic-crystal fiber as its main-amplifier, emits a record average output power of 2 kW, by amplifying stretched ps-pulses. A further increase of the output power was only limited by the available laser-diode pump power. The energy of the pulses is 100 μJ, corresponding to MW-level peak powers extracted directly from the fiber of the main amplifier. The corresponding M2 at the maximum output power is

We present a novel ytterbium (Yb)-doped large-pitch fiber design with significantly increased pump absorption and higher energy storage/gain per unit length, which enables high-peak-power fiber laser systems with smaller footprints. Up to now index matching between core and surrounding material in microstructured fibers was achieved by co-doping the active core region with fluorine. Here we carry out the index matching by passively doping the cladding with germanium, thus raising its index of refraction. Hence, the fluorine in the core can be omitted, which leads to an effective increase of the core doping concentration, while detrimental effects such as photo-darkening and lifetime quenching are avoided by maintaining the bulk Yb concentration. Experiments and simulations show that a gain higher than 50 dB/m and an output average power higher than 100 W with excellent beam quality are feasible even with a fiber length of only 40 cm.

We investigate high-power operation of a very-large-mode-area (VLMA) fiber concept based on an index-antiguiding, thermally guiding core in which an ytterbium-doped region is completely surrounded by silica with a slightly higher refractive index. Experimentally, regimes of antiguidance, single-mode operation, and mode instabilities predominantly with radially symmetric higher-order modes are observed. Fundamental limitations for conventional VLMA step-index fibers are discussed.

We report on the experimental realization of a compact, fiber-based, ultrashort-pulse laser system in the 2 μm wavelength region delivering 24 fs pulse duration with 24 MW pulse peak power and 24.6 W average power. This performance level has been enabled by the favorable quadratic wavelength-dependence of the self-focusing limit, which has been experimentally verified to be at approximately 24 MW for circular polarization in a solid-core fused-silica fiber operated at a wavelength around 2 μm. The anomalous dispersion in this wavelength region allows for a simultaneous nonlinear spectral broadening and temporal pulse compression. This makes an additional compression stage redundant and facilitates a very simple and power-scalable approach. Simulations that include both the nonlinear pulse evolution and the transverse optical Kerr effect support the experimental results.

A novel interrogation technique for fiber Bragg gratings is presented. It is based on measuring the characteristics of the outgoing near-field radiation from a tilted fiber grating. This scheme was experimentally checked and was found to offer a wide wavelength interrogation range as well as a good linearity, stability, and wavelength resolution.

A high-power thulium (Tm)-doped fiber chirped-pulse amplification system emitting a record compressed average output power of 152 W and 4 MW peak power is demonstrated. This result is enabled by utilizing Tm-doped photonic crystal fibers with mode-field diameters of 35 μm, which mitigate detrimental nonlinearities, exhibit slope efficiencies of more than 50%, and allow for reaching a pump-power-limited average output power of 241 W. The high-compression efficiency has been achieved by using multilayer dielectric gratings with diffraction efficiencies higher than 98%.

In this Letter, we demonstrate a single-mode continuous-wave fiber laser amplifier emitting 146 W of average output power at a wavelength of 1009 nm. The wavelength and bandwidth of the seed oscillator are defined by a pair of fiber Bragg gratings. The seed is amplified in a two-stage ytterbium-doped rod-type amplifier to 146 W with a high slope efficiency of 64%, showing excellent beam quality and stability throughout the experiment. The ASE suppression is as high as 63 dB.

We present an enhanced technique for dispersion-free pulse shortening, which exploits the interplay of different third-order nonlinear effects in a waveguide structure. When exceeding a certain value of the pulse energy coupled into the waveguide, the typical oscillations of self-phase modulation (SPM)-broadened spectra vanish during pulse propagation. Such smoothed spectra ensure a high pulse quality of the spectrally filtered and, therefore, temporally shortened pulses independently of the filtering position. A reduction of the pulse duration from 138 to 24 ps has been achieved while preserving a high temporal quality. To the best of our knowledge, the nonlinear smoothing of SPM-broadened spectra is used in the context of dispersion-free pulse duration reduction for the first time.

We report on a high pulse energy and high average power Q-switched Tm-doped fiber oscillator. The oscillator produces 2.4 mJ pulses with 33 W average power (at a repetition rate of 13.9 kHz) and nearly diffraction-limited beam quality. This record performance is enabled by a Tm-doped large-pitch fiber, which allows for large core diameters in combination with effective single-mode operation.

We report on a laser system producing a burst comprising femtosecond pulses with a total energy of 58 mJ. Every single pulse within this burst has an energy between 27 and 31 μJ. The pump is able to rebuild the inversion fast enough between the pulses, resulting in an almost constant gain for every pulse during the burst. This causes a very homogenous energy distribution during the burst. The output burst has a repetition frequency of 20 Hz, is 200 μs long and, therefore, contains 2000 pulses at a pulse repetition rate of 10 MHz.

We present a dispersion-free method for the pulse duration reduction of passively Q-switched microchip laser (MCL) seed sources. This technique comprises two stages: one that carries out the self-phase modulation induced spectral broadening in a waveguide structure and a subsequent spectral filtering stage in order to shorten the pulses in time domain. The setup of a proof-of-principle experiment consists of a fiber-amplified passively Q-switched MCL, a passive single-mode fiber used as nonlinear element in which the spectrum is broadened, and a reflective volume-Bragg-grating acting as bandpass filter. A reduction of the pulse duration from 118 to 32 ps with high temporal quality has been achieved with this setup.

A high-speed mode analysis technique is required to gain fundamental understanding of mode instabilities in high-power fiber laser systems. In this work a technique, purely based on the intensity profile of the beam, is demonstrated to be ideally suited to analyze fiber laser dynamics. This technique, together with a high-speed camera, has been applied to the study of the temporal dynamics of mode instabilities at high average powers with up to 20,000 frames per second. These measurements confirm that energy transfer between the fluctuating transversal modes takes place in millisecond-time-scale.

We report on the suppression of stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) in a double-clad fiber amplifier using long-period gratings (LPGs). The LPGs, fabricated with a CO(2) laser, achieve SRS suppression by coupling the Stokes wavelength from the active core into the cladding. With only three LPGs inserted into a fiber pulse amplifier, the extractable Raman-free output power was nearly doubled. A numerical simulation of the setup shows good agreement with the experimental results.

An efficient and simple approach for converting pulsed near-IR laser radiation into visible and mid-IR light by exploiting degenerate four-wave-mixing in an endlessly single-mode, large-mode-area photonic-crystal fiber is presented. Coupling a 1 MHz, 200 ps, 8 W average power pulsed source emitting at 1064 nm into this fiber results in average powers of 3 W at 673 nm signal wavelength and of 450 mW at 2539 nm idler wavelength, respectively. The excellent pulse energy conversion efficiencies of 35% for the signal and 6% for the idler wavelength are due to the unique combination of characteristics of this type of fiber. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America

In Brillouin-assisted slow-light the induced delay is always linked to a particular gain; i.e., the delay is directly proportional to the gain expressed in decibels. However, for certain applications this may be restrictive, and techniques to decouple gain and delay are thus of considerable practical interest. We propose a way to effectively decouple these two parameters that, subject to inherent physical constraints, can be used to obtain a delay line capable of providing arbitrary gain (or alternatively an amplifier that can provide arbitrary delay for a fixed gain). The decoupling mechanism relies upon operating the amplifier in the pump-depletion regime. Other advantages of this approach, as well as its limitations in the context of slow-light, are discussed.