We present a femtosecond laser system at 920 nm delivering ultrashort pulses via a hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber (HC-PBGF). The laser system is designed to simplify two-photon microscopy applications and can be used for miniaturized two-photon microscopes. While previously presented solutions have been tailored to a specific length and dispersion coefficient of the HC-PBGF, we now show a compact and flexible scheme for dispersion compensation which is compatible with a wide range of fiber types and lengths.
In addition, this new approach fully maintains the capability of software-controlled dispersion compensation in the range from 0 to -40,000 fs2 after the pulse delivery fiber. Hence, the dispersion of common two-photon microscopes can be pre-compensated in order to obtain compressed pulses at the sample plane. Our newly developed system displays excellent long-term fiber coupling stability under varying environmental conditions. It is capable of polarization-preserving femtosecond pulse delivery at 920 nm and reaches Watt-level power after the delivery fiber, making it suitable for in-vivo brain imaging of GCaMP in mouse models.
Over past three decades ultrafast lasers have come a long way from the bulky, demanding and very sensitive scientific research projects to widely available commercial products. For the majority of this period the titanium-sapphire-based ultrafast systems were the workhorse for scientific and emerging industrial and biomedical applications. However the complexity and intrinsic bulkiness of solid state lasers have prevented even larger penetration into wider array of practical applications. With emergence of femtosecond fiber lasers, based primarily on Er-doped and Yb-doped fibers that provide compact, inexpensive and dependable fs and ps pulses, new practical applications have become a reality. The overview of current state of the art ultrafast fiber sources, their basic principles and most prominent applications will be presented, including micromachining and biomedical implementations (ophthalmology) on one end of the pulse energy spectrum and 3D lithography and THz applications on the other.
Mid- infrared ultrafast pulses are of interest in different applications ranging from vibrational spectroscopy, strong field physics (stable CEP) to detection of trace quantities of compounds. The traditional approach uses solid state lasers, i.e. mature but sensitive technology that is restricted to laboratory use due to its complexity. In real-world applications, ultrashort fiber lasers offer a more rugged, portable and scalable platform for the generation of tunable, brilliant mid-IR femtosecond pulses. This paper will cover approaches for the generation of high-intensity femtosecond pulses in the mid-IR region by means of DFG. The DFG technique also opens up new avenues for frequency comb applications and tunable absolute optical frequency sources. It can be used to set up intrinsically phase stable amplified laser systems as well. The power scalability of lasers with doped Thulium fibers made it possible to generate supercontinua in the mid-IR. Our mid-IR sources along with the availability of high power fiber optics, double clad doped gain fibers and LMA fibers for the 2μm and 1μm region enables "all fiber" compact and robust sources that can be man-portable.
We present an Erbium:Ytterbium codoped fiber-amplifer system based on Divided-Pulses-Amplification (DPA) for ultrashort pulses. The output from a saturable-absorber mode-locked polarization-maintaining (PM) fiber oscillator is amplified in a PM normal-dispersion Erbium-doped fiber. After this stage the pulses are positively chirped and have a duration of 2.0 ps at an average power of 93 mW. A stack of 5 birefringent Yttrium-Vanadate crystals divides these pulses 32 times. We amplify these pulses using a double-clad Erbium:Ytterbium codoped fiber pumped through a multimode fiber combiner. The pulses double pass the amplifier and recombine in the crystals using non-reciprocal polarization 90◦ rotation by a Faraday rotating mirror. Pulses with a duration of 144 fs are obtained after separation from the input beam using a polarizing beam splitter cube. These pulses have an average power of 1.85 W at a repetition rate of 80 MHz. The generation of femtosecond pulses directly from the amplifier was enabled by a positively chirped seed pulse, normally dispersive Yttrium-Vanadate crystals, and anomalously dispersive amplifier fibers. Efficient frequency doubling to 780 nm with an average power of 725 mW and a pulse duration of 156 fs is demonstrated. In summary we show a DPA setup that enables the generation of femtosecond pulses at watt-level at 1560 nm without the need for further external dechirping and demonstrate a good pulse quality by efficient frequency doubling. Due to the use of PM fiber components and a Faraday rotator the setup is environmentally stable.
We demonstrate a fiber-based two-color source of picosecond pulses for coherent Raman scattering (CRS) microscopy.
An Yb-doped fiber laser combined with a divided-pulse amplifier produce up to 3 W of power tunable from 1030 nm to
1040 nm. A normal dispersion photonic crystal fiber is used to blue-shift the pulses through seeded four-wave mixing.
Pulses with up to 150 mW of average power are produced, tunable between 770 nm and 800 nm. Imaging of animal
tissue and cells is demonstrated.
The frequency-doubled radiation of an Erbium-doped fiber laser is used for supercontinuum generation in a small-core
microstructured fiber with two zero-dispersion wavelengths. Average powers up to 49 mW are launched
into the highly nonlinear photonic-crystal fiber. The generated supercontinuum shows a short-wavelength peak
centered around 670 nm and a long-wavelength peak centered around 1100 nm. More than 35 mW is contained
in the short-wavelength peak. We use the anomalous dispersion of a SF10 prism compressor to compress the
short-wavelength peak of the spectrum. The compressed pulse has a central wavelength of 670 nm and a duration
of 27 fs.
A method for measuring the timing jitter in a 1550 nm mode-locked fiber laser, with the help of an autocorrelator, has been developed and the error in measuring the value of the jitter has been evaluated. The preliminary results have shown that the fluctuations of the jitter are higher than the medium value of the jitter itself, so we decided to use some amplifiers in the circuit in order to eliminate this problem. The setup was changed by adding a laser diode, with the wavelength of 980 nm, and an erbium fiber. The medium value of the jitter we obtained (from eight measurements) for our setup was 78.8 fs. In order to still improve the measurements, we changed the time constant of the autocorrelator from 1.1 ps to 10 fs. The new medium value we obtained for the timing jitter was 78.33 fs. Finally, we calculated the error in measuring the timing jitter in our setup. We can say that the optical cross correlations present a powerful tool for characterizing the timing jitter in mode-locked fiber lasers.
We demonstrate here an all-fiber passively mode-locked laser using an integrated fiber-end mirror and photonic band-gap
fiber-based dispersion compensator. The refined technology of thin-film coatings made with electron beam
evaporation on a single-mode fiber facet results in a compact dichroic pump combiner/output coupler. The dichroic
mirror made of ZrO2 and SiO2 provides a low reflectivity (0.4 %) for the 980 nm pump and over 40 % reflectivity for the
1040 nm signal wavelength, which enabled us to build a short-length mode-locked ytterbium fiber laser. The laser cavity
consisted of 8 cm of highly doped ytterbium fiber, 10 cm of anomalous dispersion photonic bandgap fiber, a
semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) and the dichroic mirror. Pump and signal wavelengths were
separated by a fiber coupler placed outside the cavity contrary to conventional geometry. A butt-coupled SESAM
provided reliable self-starting at a pump power of 150 mW. The all-fiber design using dichroic fiber mirror combined
with photonic bandgap fiber dispersion compensator is highly stable and requires virtually no alignment. The mode-locked
laser produces 572-fs soliton pulses at 571.03 MHz fundamental repetition rate. To the best of our knowledge,
this is the highest fundamental repetition rate fiber laser operating around 1 μm reported to date.
We present new approaches for power scaling and tunability in semiconductor disk lasers. The novel concepts allow for
reduced thermal load of the gain material, increasing the threshold of rollover and extending the capability for boosting
the output power without significant degradation in the beam quality. The proposed technique for power scaling of
optically-pumped semiconductor disk lasers is based on the multiple gain scheme. The method allows for significant
power improvement while preserving good beam quality. Total power of over 8 W was achieved in dual-gain
configuration, while one-gain lasers could produce separately about 4 W, limited by the thermal rollover of the output
characteristics. The results show that reduced thermal load to a gain element in a dual-gain cavity allows extending the
range of usable pump powers boosting the laser output.
Tunable Sb-based semiconductor disk laser operating at 2-&mgr;m is demonstrated with nearly 100 nm operation range. The
maximum output is 210 mW and the 3dB tuning range spans from 1946 to 1997 nm. The wavelength tuning is based on
an intracavity birefringent filter. The potential of semiconductor disk lasers for high repetition rate ultrashort pulse
generation using harmonic mode-locking is also discussed. We report on optically-pumped vertical-external-cavity
surface-emitting lasers passively mode-locked with a semiconductor saturable-absorber mirror. The potential of
harmonic mode-locking in producing pulse trains at multigigahertz repetition rates has been explored. The results present
first systematic study of multiple pulse formation in passively mode-locked VECSELs.
We report here a compact diode-pumped fiber laser that represents a promising route to designing a portable picosecond light source that is rugged and compact. The laser design presented in this paper is based on a high-contrast semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) and targets a reliable picosecond-range fiber laser. The cavity is simple, since no dispersion compensators are used, the SESAM-based mode locking mechanism is robust, and self-starting resulted in low-maintenance turn-key operation. We investigated pulse formation in a short-length fiber cavity and found that nonlinear effects in a near-resonant SESAM in combination with the large cavity dispersion are the predominant mechanism that causes self-starting and stabilization of mode-locking. The effect of the recovery time of the SESAM on the stretched-pulse width and spectrum for resonant-type absorber mirrors was also studied.
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