Amplification of femtosecond pulses in large mode area Bragg fibers

Dmitry A. Gaponov; Sébastien Février; Philippe Roy; Marc Hanna; Dimitris N. Papadopoulos; Frédéric Druon; Louis Daniault; Patrick Georges; Mikhail E. Likhachev; Mikhail Y. Salganskii; Mikhail V. Yashkov

doi:10.1117/12.854581

14 May 2010 Amplification of femtosecond pulses in large mode area Bragg fibers

Dmitry A. Gaponov, Sébastien Février, Philippe Roy, Marc Hanna, Dimitris N. Papadopoulos, Frédéric Druon, Louis Daniault, Patrick Georges, Mikhail E. Likhachev, Mikhail Y. Salganskii, Mikhail V. Yashkov

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 7714, Photonic Crystal Fibers IV; 771405 (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.854581
Event: SPIE Photonics Europe, 2010, Brussels, Belgium

Abstract

The increase of the output power in fiber lasers and amplifiers is directly related to the scaling of the core diameter. State of the art high power laser and amplifier setups are based on large mode area (LMA) photonic crystal fibers (PCF) exhibiting core diameters ranging from 40 μm up to 100 μm¹ (rod-type PCF). For instance, a two-stage femtosecond chirped pulse amplification (CPA) system based on 80 μm core diameter rod-type PCF was demonstrated generating 270 fs 100 μJ pulses2. Although highly suited to reach very large mode areas, this fiber design suffers some drawbacks such as high bend sensitivity (for core diameter equal to or larger than 40 μm³) and practical handling (cleaving, splicing, etc.) due to presence of air holes. As an alternative we have recently proposed all-solid photonic bandgap (PBG) Bragg fiber (BF) design⁴. Due to their waveguiding mechanism completely different from total internal reflection this type of fiber offers a very flexible geometry for designing waveguide structures with demanding properties (singlemodedness in large core configuration⁵, chromatic dispersion⁶, polarization maintaining⁷, low bend sensitivity⁸). During the last few years our interest was mainly focused on the realization of an active BF and scaling up the core diameter. We showed that, in principle, core diameters in excess of 50 μm can be reached⁹. As an example, an Yb-doped LMA BF with 20 μm core diameter was realized and single transverse mode operation in continuous wave (cw)⁹ and mode-locking¹⁰ oscillation regimes was demonstrated. Moreover, operation of two dimensional all-solid PBG fibers in laser and amplifier regimes was recently demonstrated^11-13. In this paper we report on the first demonstration of amplification of femtosecond pulses in LMA PBG BF. A single transverse mode was obtained and the BF allowed for generating 5 μJ 260 fs pulses in a system with a moderate stretching of 150 ps.

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Dmitry A. Gaponov, Sébastien Février, Philippe Roy, Marc Hanna, Dimitris N. Papadopoulos, Frédéric Druon, Louis Daniault, Patrick Georges, Mikhail E. Likhachev, Mikhail Y. Salganskii, and Mikhail V. Yashkov "Amplification of femtosecond pulses in large mode area Bragg fibers", Proc. SPIE 7714, Photonic Crystal Fibers IV, 771405 (14 May 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.854581

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