Abstract

Tunable Distributed-Bragg-Reflector (DBR) lasers have shown 22 nm tunability in CW operation.^[1] The first investigations of their dynamic-tuning properties revealed the possibility to generate linearly chirped optical wave with large chirp bandwidth.^[2,3] The possible chirp value of more than 10 nm exceeds those obtained from gain-switched DFB lasers^[4] by an order of magnitude. This implies that subpicosecond optical pulse durations can be achieved by fibre compression instead of the 2 ps referred to in Ref. ⁴. In this paper, we report on chirped-pulse generation from a DBR laser, the subsequent pulse amplification in erbium-doped fibre amplifier and a final compression in order to obtain ultrashort optical pulses with high peak-power. These fibre amplifiers have excellent output power saturation characteristics^[5] suitable for achieving high peak-powers.

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