Abstract

The amplification of ultrashort pulses to high powers in optical fiber amplifiers is usually associated with severe pulse distortion due to optical wave-breaking, limiting the usefulness of such amplifiers in ultrafast optics. For sufficiently high gain, however, an incident ultrashort pulse in a fiber amplifier with normal dispersion evolves into a a parabolic pulse which propagates in a wave-breaking free manner [1, 2]. Here, we report the first experimental generation and characterization of such parabolic pulses using frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG). The pulses retain their parabolic profile after self-similar propagation in standard fiber and are compressed to 70 fs pulses with 80 kW peak power.

© 2000 IEEE