Abstract

Recently, powerful white light laser sources have been developed based on frequency converted optical parametric oscillators As pump source high average power picosecond lasers have been applied In general these lasers consist of a passively mode locked solid state laser and a sequence of amplifier stages However, these systems tend to have a bulky design In addition power scaling is complicated due to thermally induced effects in the amplifier stages Fiber lasers offer an alternative to these conventional systems The single pass gain in a fiber amplifier is sufficient to amplify picosecond pulses in just one stage up to an average power of several ten watts

© 2000 IEEE