Generation of wideband tunable femtosecond laser based on nonlinear propagation of power-scaled mode-locked femtosecond laser pulses in photonic crystal fiber* *Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61805274), the Major Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 12034020), and Research Foundation of Inner Mongolia University of China (Grant No. 21200-5215108).

Abstract

We implement an experimental study for the generation of wideband tunable femtosecond laser with a home-made power-scaled mode-locked fiber oscillator as the pump source. By coupling the sub-100 fs mode-locked pulses into a nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (NL-PCF), the exited spectra have significant nonlinear broadening and cover a spectra range of hundreds of nm. In experiment, by reasonably optimizing the structure parameters of NL-PCF and regulating the power of the incident pulses, femtosecond laser with tuning range of 900–1290 nm is realized. The research approach promotes the development of femtosecond lasers with center wavelengths out of the traditional laser gain media toward the direction of simplicity and ease of implementation.