Abstract

Ultrashort, wavelength tunable laser pulses find an increasing range of quite different applications, like measurement techniques of ultrafast physical phenomena (e.g. electro-optic sampling), analysis of environmental data, and telecommunications. A simple way to generate wavelength tunable semiconductor lasers pulses having a width (FWHM) of a few picoseconds is self-seeding (SeSe) of a gain-switched Fabry-Perot (FP) laser diode and subsequent chirp compensation. This technique is particularly simple and low-cost. Neither highly sophisticated laser structures like, e.g. Tunable Twin Guide (TTG) or multi-section DBR lasers, nor anti-reflection coating of the facet, as required for mode-locking, is needed. Additional compression of SeSe pulses can be performed using nonlinear (soliton) effects in fibers. The potentially most promising method to generate ultrashort pulses of high quality is adiabatic pulse compression in dispersion decreasing fibers. In this contribution we demonstrated that it is indeed possible to generate femtosecond wavelength tunable pulses in such a way.

© 1998 IEEE