Red picosecond pulses generated by frequency doubling a Raman amplified widely tunable 1.3 µm fiber ring laser

Abstract

We generated 0.66 microm picosecond pulses by second-harmonic generation of the Raman amplified output of a 1.3 microm actively mode-locked fiber ring laser in a periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate (PPKTP) waveguide. The ring laser produced 9 ps pulses at a 20 GHz repetition frequency, was tunable over 1284-1330 nm, and was based on a semiconductor optical amplifier and a Mach-Zehnder amplitude modulator. The Raman amplifier served both to amplify the ring laser and to compress the pulses as solitons. The spectral flexibility of the amplifiers and the modulator should enable similar configurations to be made at other wavelengths and facilitate efficient frequency doubling in waveguides to other visible wavelengths.