Generation of few-cycle pulses from a mode-locked Tm-doped fiber laser

We report a compact, self-starting dispersion-managed mode-locked thulium-doped fiber oscillator that delivers 2.6 nJ pulses at 2 µm with a repetition rate of 250 MHz. The average output power and spectral bandwidth of the pulses reach impressive values of 648 mW and 103 nm, respectively. The genera...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Optics letters 2021-05, Vol.46 (10), p.2445-2448
Main Authors: Wang, Jinzhang, Lai, Weiyu, Wei, Kun, Yang, Kuilei, Zhu, Huiye, Zheng, Zhijian, Guo, Chunyu, Ruan, Shuangchen, Yan, Peiguang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attenuation
Compressing
Doped fibers
Fiber lasers
Molecular spectroscopy
Thulium
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Summary:We report a compact, self-starting dispersion-managed mode-locked thulium-doped fiber oscillator that delivers 2.6 nJ pulses at 2 µm with a repetition rate of 250 MHz. The average output power and spectral bandwidth of the pulses reach impressive values of 648 mW and 103 nm, respectively. The generated pulses are near linearly chirped, capable of linearly compressing to 74 fs in a normal dispersion fiber after power attenuation. Using a nonlinear fiber compression scheme can even compress the pulses to 29 fs (4.3-cycle). The remaining pulse energy is 1.15 nJ, and the corresponding peak power is estimated as 39.4 kW. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of nonlinearly compressing the pulse of a 2 µm fiber oscillator to the sub-5 cycle regime. Such a few-cycle fiber laser could be an ideal candidate source for short-wavelength mid-infrared frequency metrology and molecular spectroscopy applications.
ISSN:0146-9592
1539-4794
DOI:10.1364/OL.420379