J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 29, 2270–2274 (2012)
Chirped pulse amplification, a process often used to increase the pulse energy from a fibre oscillator, suffers from large spectral modulation and pedestal generation when it is seeded by solitons. Although similaritons, which are self-similarly evolving pulses, are a good candidate seed owing to their linear chirp, chirped pulse amplification seeded by similaritons has not been demonstrated before at the telecommunications wavelength of 1,550 nm. Junsong Peng and colleagues from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China have now experimentally demonstrated an all-fibre, similariton-seeded amplification and compression system at this wavelength. Similaritons were first generated in a dispersion-managed ring cavity made of a 130-cm-long erbium-doped fibre and with a net dispersion of 0.021 ps2. They were then passed through an erbium-doped fibre amplifier that provided gain and further stretched the similaritons to avoid nonlinear effects during amplification. Lastly, the similaritons were compressed in a single-mode fibre. At the output of the scheme, the team obtained 4.1-nJ, 75.6-fs pedestal-free pulses, with a peak power of 54 kW and a spectral width of 51 nm without any spectral spikes. With higher pump power, the researchers say that a higher peak power, comparable to solid-state lasers, can be achieved.
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