Abstract
Ultrafast fiber lasers have the potential to make applications of ultrashort pulses widespread - techniques not only for scientists, but also for doctors, manufacturing engineers, and more. Today, this potential is only realized in refractive surgery and some femtosecond micromachining. The existing market for ultrafast lasers remains dominated by solid-state lasers, primarily Ti:sapphire, due to their superior performance. Recent advances show routes to ultrafast fiber sources that provide performance and capabilities equal to, and in some cases beyond, those of Ti:sapphire, in compact, versatile, low-cost devices. In this paper, we discuss the prospects for future ultrafast fiber lasers built on new kinds of pulse generation that capitalize on nonlinear dynamics. We focus primarily on three promising directions: mode-locked oscillators that use nonlinearity to enhance performance; systems that use nonlinear pulse propagation to achieve ultrashort pulses without a mode-locked oscillator; and multimode fiber lasers that exploit nonlinearities in space and time to obtain unparalleled control over an electric field.
Highlights
Nonlinearity is the traditional bane of physicists
The history of mode-locked fiber oscillators is a story of advances in nonlinear pulse propagation leading to breakthroughs in laser performance
The Mamyshev oscillator is the latest leap in this pattern, delivering order-of-magnitude improvements in both the peak nonlinear phase and the peak power in an environmentally-stable design
Summary
Nonlinearity is the traditional bane of physicists. We try our best to ignore it. Rather than jockeying for midnight shifts at million-dollar accelerators, biophysicists and materials scientists might perform the majority of their work from the comfort of their own labs Meeting this remarkable demand for compact, powerful, and cost-effective ultrafast lasers will require more than engineering around known, linear constraints: it will require diving headfirst into all the possibilities that optical nonlinearities have to offer. We highlight work by our group and others that breaks from the pattern of avoiding nonlinearity, and instead explores lasers where nonlinearity is tolerated, but is embraced These successes in merging optical science with applied nonlinear dynamics have led to major improvements in fiber laser performance, with pulse energies increasing by multiple orders of magnitude. We discuss opportunities for extending nonlinear fiber systems to the highly multimode regime, and the advantages contained therein
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