Abstract

By exploiting the unique combination of an active medium and nonlinearity in a single-mode Nd³⁺ fiber laser, we demonstrate self-sustained generation of pedestal-free bandwidth-limited pulses as short as 125 fs (Fig. 1) at a wavelength of 1.064 μm by additive pulse-compression mode locking (APCM). The pulse bandwidth of 9.4 nm (Fig. 2) is larger than the homogeneous linewidth of the Nd³⁺-laser, which demonstrates that the homogeneous linewidth is not a limiting factor for ultrashort pulse generation in glass lasers. The operation principle of APCM is similar to an optimized version of additive pulse modelocking (APM)¹ (or the soliton laser²) combined with soliton shaping (SS).³

© 1991 Optical Society of America