Abstract
The soliton laser, a novel concept in ultrashort-pulse lasers, is a mode-locked laser using pulse compression and solitons in a single-mode fiber to force the laser itself to produce pulses of a well-defined shape and width. Thus the fiber is in one way or another involved in the laser’s feedback loop. Although the basic concept is a general one, we report here primarily on the first successful version[1], based on a sync-pumped, mode-locked color-center laser operating in the 1.5 pm region. To date this color-center soliton laser has directly produced pulses as short as 130 fsec, and has allowed for the production of pulses of as little as 50 fsec FWHM, by compression in a second, external fiber. Other advantages include wide tunability (limited only by power requirements for soliton production in the fiber), output pulses that are always transform limited, easy adjustment for production of ~sech2 pulse shape. and a relative simplicity of construction.
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References
L.F. Mollenauer and R.H. Stolen, “The Soliton Laser,” Opt. Lett. 9, 13 (1984)
L.F. Mollenauer, R.H. Stolen, and J.P. Gordon, “Expermental observation of picosecond pulse narrowing and solitons in optical fibers,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 45, 1095 (1980)
H.A. Haus and M.N. Islam, “Theory of the soliton laser,” unpub. Also see M.N. Islam and H.A. Haus, postdeadline paper PD2, 1984 Conf. on Ultrafast Phenomena, Monterey, Ca.
L.F. Mollenauer, N.D. Vieira, and L. Szeto, “Mode locking by synchronous pumping using a gain medium with microsecond decay times,” Opt. Lett. 7, 414 (1982)
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L.F. Mollenauer, R.H. Stolen, J.P. Gordon, and W.J. Tomlinson, “Extreme picosecond pulse narrowing by means of soliton effect in single-mode optical fibers,” Opt. Lett. 8, 289 (1983)
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© 1984 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Mollenauer, L.F., Stolen, R.H. (1984). The Soliton Laser. In: Auston, D.H., Eisenthal, K.B. (eds) Ultrafast Phenomena IV. Springer Series in Chemical Physics, vol 38. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82378-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82378-7_1
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