Abstract

In an effort to utilize the full gain bandwidth of the erbium doped fiber for production of ultrashort pulses, several groups have used various methods of passive mode locking. This process is limited by the dispersion in the fiber cavity. Novel fibers are available which have very large normal dispersion at 1.5 microns. By adding small amounts of this fiber to the laser cavity the second order dispersion can be arbitrarily reduced. This type of compensation has allowed pulses shorter than 100 fs to be produced.^[1]

© 1993 Optical Society of America