Abstract
Self-phase modulation in fiber amplifiers can significantly degrade the quality of compressed pulses in chirped pulse amplification systems. Parabolic pulses with linear frequency chirp are suitable for suppressing nonlinearities, and to achieve high peak power pulses after compression. In this paper, we present an active time domain technique to generate parabolic pulses for chirped pulse amplification applications. Pulses from a mode-locked laser are temporally stretched and launched into an amplitude modulator, where the drive voltage is designed using the spectral shape of the input pulse and the transfer function of the modulator, resulting in the generation of parabolic pulses. Experimental results of pulse shaping with a pulse train from a mode-locked laser are presented, with a residual error of less than 5%. Moreover, an extinction ratio of 27 dB is achieved, which is ideal for chirped pulse amplification applications.
Highlights
Chirped pulse amplification (CPA) has been widely used to achieve pulses with high energy for many applications such as radar technology or non-thermal ablation [1,2,3,4,5]
The near transform limited pulses generated by a mode-locked laser (MLL) are temporally stretched using dispersioncompensating fiber (DCF)
Using a mode-locked laser source, parabolic pulses with less than 5% error and 27 dB signal to noise ratio are achieved
Summary
Chirped pulse amplification (CPA) has been widely used to achieve pulses with high energy for many applications such as radar technology or non-thermal ablation [1,2,3,4,5]. Optical pulses, whose temporal shape is parabolic, appear to be a very suitable candidate for reducing the impact of nonlinearities and to achieve high peak powers [8]. The linear chirp allows efficient pulse compression, making parabolic pulses especially suitable for use in a wide range of applications, such as high power femtosecond lasers, super-continuum generation for optical telecommunications, fiber amplifiers and chirped pulse amplification [14,15]
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