Compact, coherent, high brightness light sources for the mid and far IR

摘要

Compact high brightness light sources for the mid and far IR spectral region, and exemplary applications are disclosed based on passively mode locked Tm fiber comb lasers. In at least one embodiment the coherence of the comb sources is increased in a system utilizing an amplified single-frequency laser to pump the Tm fiber comb laser. The optical bandwidth generated by the passively mode locked Tm fiber comb laser is further decreased by using simultaneous 2nd and 3rd order dispersion compensation using either appropriate chirped fiber Bragg gratings for dispersion compensation, or fibers with appropriately selected values of 2nd and 3rd order dispersion. Fibers with large anomalous values of third order dispersion, or fibers with large numerical apertures, for example fibers having air-holes formed in the fiber cladding may be utilized.

主权项

1. A fiber-laser based, chirped pulse amplification system, comprising:
a passively mode locked fiber oscillator operating at or near a wavelength of 2000 nm; a pulse stretcher receiving pulses from said passively mode locked fiber oscillator and producing stretched pulses; a fiber amplifier amplifying said stretched pulses and producing stretched and amplified pulses; a linear pulse compressor to compress said stretched and amplified pulses; and a large mode area fiber configured to nonlinearly compress the pulses output from the linear pulse compressor so as to further compress the pulses via Raman-soliton generation or higher order soliton compression.