Abstract
Historically rare earth doped glasses, although they exhibit a wide gain bandwidth allowing the formation of ultrashort pulses, have been avoided because of their low gain and poor thermal characteristics. Both of these weaknesses were removed with the development of rare earth doped low loss optical fibers. It was now possible to have effective rod lengths of meters and concentrations dictated by efficiency rather than the requirements of transverse pumping. Solid state systems now became high gain and air cooled. With the efficiency of diode laser pumping came high efficiency energy conversion and the possibility to make the entire laser compact and high performance. The fiber structure itself provided the final requirement, and that was to allow access to the effects of the nonlinear index due to the tight confinement of the lasing light and the long lengths of material in the cavity. As a result of these factors it has been possible to construct a variety of ultrashort pulse fiber laser sources which can be compact and efficient. These sources will potentially have a great impact on the investigation of ultrafast phenomena and high speed communications.
© 1994 Optical Society of America
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