Abstract

Recently there has been great interest in finding an inexpensive, compact alternative seeding source for regenerative amplifiers to replace the argon-pumped Ti:sapphire laser. Previously an erbium-doped fiber laser has been amplified and frequency doubled and used to seed an alexanderite regenerative amplifier.¹ We report here the demonstration of a frequency-doubled diode-pumped stretched-pulse additive-pulse mode-locked (SP-APM) fiber laser producing 91-pJ pulses with 3.2 mW of average power. Pulse energies on this order are required to seed high-repetition-rate regenerative amplifiers to avoid amplified spontaneous emission background.² The 35.2-MHz repetition rate of our system results in a visible red beam, which simplifies alignment of the amplifier system.

© 1996 Optical Society of America