Abstract

During the past several years ultrashort pulse technology has advanced dramatically from the picosecond to the femtosecond time domain. The colliding-pulse-modelocked (CPM) cw dye laser [1] is now a reliable source of pulses shorter than 100 fsec; and pulses from other laser systems are being compressed to similar durations by nonlinear optical fiber methods. [2] Fiber compression of amplified pulses from a CPM-based system has already been used to generate 30 fsec pulses. [3] In this paper we describe experiments in which this same combination of techniques has been extended to produce pulses as short as 16 fsec. [4] These pulses, with a center wavelength of about 620 nm, are comprised of only 8 optical cycles.

© 1984 Optical Society of America