Tunable pulse width and multi-megawatt peak-power pulses from a nonlinearly compressed monolithic fiber MOPA system

Abstract

We report on tunable pulse width and high peak power pulse generation from a nonlinearly compressed monolithic fiber MOPA system. The master seed source employs a Mach-Zehnder intensity modulator (MZIM). This seed source has operational flexibility with respect to pulse width, 90 ps to 2 ns and repetition rate, 200 kHz to 2 MHz. The seed pulses are amplified by a monolithic three-stage amplifier system based on polarization maintain Yb-doped fibers. The maximum output power was 32 W at the shortest pulse condition, the pulse width of 90 ps and the repetition rate of 750 kHz. A spectral width after amplification was broadened to 0.73 nm at RMS width. Both of ASE and SRS are not observed in the spectrum. After amplification, we also demonstrated pulse compression with a small piece of chirped volume Bragg-grating (CVBG) which has the dispersion rate of 81 ps/nm. As a result of pulse compression, the shortest pulse width was reduced from 90 ps to 3.5 ps, which brought an increase of the peak power up to 3.2 MW. The compressed pulses are clean with little structure in their wings. We can expand the operation range of the monolithic fiber MOPA system in pulse width, 3.5 ps to 2 ns.