A practical and compact subpicosecond optical fibre amplifier

Abstract

Many experiments on all optical signal processing for high speed communications systems require the generation of high energy subpicosecond pulses. The production of such pulses in optical fibres is limited by the high peak powers generated in the fibre core and the onset of large nonlinear effects such as SPM induced spectral broadening and Raman scattering of the pulse energy to longer wavelengths. The usual technique to overcome these limitations is to employ chirped pulse amplification (CPA) to initially stretch the pulses to reduce the peak power before amplifying and recompressing them. This technique has proved successful at generating pulses with microjoule energies [1] but only at low (kHz) repetition rates. At the high repetition rates used in communication experiments CPA cannot be used because it will create overlap and interference between the pulses and therefore a different approach is required. In this paper we demonstrate the use of a large area Er/Yb fibre to directly amplify subpicosecond pulses to energies greater than 1 nJ with peak powers in excess of 2000 Watts in an all fibre configuration.

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