Browsing by Subject "Dispersion management"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
Burst-mode thulium all-fiber laser delivering femtosecond pulses at a 1 GHz intra-burst repetition rate
(Optical Society of America, 2017) Elahı, P.; Kalaycıoğlu, H.; Akçaalan, Ö.; Şenel, Ç.; Ilday, F. Ö.
We report on the development of, to the best of our knowledge, the first ultrafast burst-mode laser system operating at a central wavelength of approximately 2 μm, where water absorption and, consequently, the absorption of most biological tissue is very high. The laser comprises a harmonically mode-locked 1-GHz oscillator, which, in turn, seeds a fiber amplifier chain. The amplifier produces 500 ns long bursts containing 500 pulses with 1 GHz intra-burst and 50 kHz inter-burst repetition rates, respectively, at an average power of 1 W, corresponding to 40 nJ pulse and 20 μJ burst energies, respectively. The entire system is built in an all-fiber architecture and implements dispersion management such that output pulses are delivered directly from a single-mode fiber with a duration of 340 fs without requiring any external compression. This gigahertz-repetition-rate system is intended for ablation-cooled laser material removal in the 2 μm wavelength region, which is interesting for laser surgery due to the exceptionally high tissue absorption at this wavelength.
Open Access
Doping management for high-power fiber lasers: 100 W, few-picosecond pulse generation from an all-fiber-integrated amplifier
(Optical Society of America, 2012-07-16) Elahi, P.; Yilmaz, S.; Akçaalan, Ö.; Kalaycioğlu, H.; Öktem, B.; Şenel, Ç.; Ilday, F. Ö.; Eken, K.
Thermal effects, which limit the average power, can be minimized by using low-doped, longer gain fibers, whereas the presence of nonlinear effects requires use of high-doped, shorter fibers to maximize the peak power. We propose the use of varying doping levels along the gain fiber to circumvent these opposing requirements. By analogy to dispersion management and nonlinearity management, we refer to this scheme as doping management. As a practical first implementation, we report on the development of a fiber laser-amplifier system, the last stage of which has a hybrid gain fiber composed of high-doped and low-doped Yb fibers. The amplifier generates 100 W at 100 MHz with pulse energy of 1 μJ. The seed source is a passively mode-locked fiber oscillator operating in the all-normaldispersion regime. The amplifier comprises three stages, which are all-fiber-integrated, delivering 13 ps pulses at full power. By optionally placing a grating compressor after the first stage amplifier, chirp of the seed pulses can be controlled, which allows an extra degree of freedom in the interplay between dispersion and self-phase modulation. This way, the laser delivers 4.5 ps pulses with ∼200 kW peak power directly from fiber, without using external pulse compression.
Open Access
Sub-50 fs all-fiber Yb-doped laser with anomalous-dispersion photonic crystal fiber
(IEEE, 2013) Zhang, Zewang; Cenel, C.; Hamid, R.; İlday, F. Ömer
An intense research effort has been channelled into improving mode-locked Yb-fiber oscillators in recent years. Despite efforts in all-normal dispersion oscillators, dispersion management is evidently necessary to reach pulse durations below 50 fs. This is implemented most commonly with bulk optical components in Yb-doped fiber lasers. Increased robustness remains a valuable trait, for which all-fiber-integration is highly desirable. Photonic crystal fibers (PCF) with anomalous dispersion have small mode field diameters, enhancing nonlinear effects and usually are birefringent. The first mode-locked laser to incorporate a PCF was reported in 2002 [1]. However, mode-locking was not self-starting owing to the residual birefringence of the PCF Since then, a number of dispersion-managed Yb-doped fiber lasers using PCFs and all-fiber-integrated lasers have been reported. After 10 years, no all-fiber-integrated Yb-fiber laser has been demonstrated to support pulses below 60 fs [2]. © 2013 IEEE.