Abstract

Compact, high-power femtosecond sources are one of the most important building blocks yet to be fully developed and implemented in an ever-widening array of ultrafast applications. The advances made in fabrication of chirped fiber gratings and erbium-doped fiber amplifiers have recently led to demonstration of the all-fiber femtosecond sources with pulse energies in nJ range.^1,2 The exciting opportunity here is that with chirped fiber gratings chirped-pulse amplification system can be implemented into a very compact package, which is also robust and cost effective. Group-velocity dispersion of fiber gratings is much larger than that of standard fibers and allows one to reach large stretching/compression ratio within a short length of a fiber. The result is that, due to reduced propagation distance, threshold for nonlinear effects and pulse energies are strongly increased.

© 1996 Optical Society of America