Abstract

Rare earth doped fibers, both oxide and fluoride, exhibit broad gain bandwidths capable of supporting sub 100 femtosecond pulsewidths. To date the shortest pulses have been generated with Nd doped silicate fibers exploiting "soliton-like" shaping,¹ analogous to solid state laser systems, where ultrashort pulse generation using such techniques have been particularly successful. The operating wavelength of Er based lasers permits "true" soliton operation and many techniques and systems have been developed to investigate ultrashort pulse generation, including the widely investigated "figure-of-eight" system and loop lasers exploiting nonlinear polarization rotation as the pulse formation mechanism.³

© 1995 Optical Society of America