High fidelity femtosecond pulses from an ultrafast fiber laser system via adaptive amplitude and phase pre-shaping

Opt Express. 2008 Sep 15;16(19):15074-89. doi: 10.1364/oe.16.015074.

Abstract

The generation of high-fidelity femtosecond pulses is experimentally demonstrated in a fiber based chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) system through an adaptive amplitude and phase pre-shaping technique. A pulse shaper, based on a dual-layer liquid crystal spatial light modulator (LC-SLM), was implemented in the fiber CPA system for amplitude and phase shaping prior to amplification. The LC-SLM was controlled using a differential evolution algorithm, to maximize a two-photon absorption detector signal from the compressed fiber CPA output pulses. It is shown that this approach compensates for both accumulated phase from material dispersion and nonlinear phase modulation. A train of pulses was produced with an average power of 12.6W at a 50MHz repetition rate from our fiber CPA system, which were compressible to high fidelity pulses with a duration of 170 fs.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Amplifiers, Electronic*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Computer-Aided Design*
  • Equipment Design
  • Equipment Failure Analysis
  • Fiber Optic Technology / instrumentation*
  • Lasers*
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Oscillometry / instrumentation*
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / instrumentation*