Development and applications of femtosecond monolithic Yb-doped fiber chirped-pulse amplifiers

Abstract

In the past few years, compact and environmentally stable high-energy ultrashort pulse laser sources have been broadly utilized in many different applications. Fiber lasers offer big practical advantages over bulk solid-state laser systems in terms of flexibility, compactness, reliability, cost effectiveness and turn-key operability.<br />Moreover, thermal effects are dramatically reduced due to the large surface-to-volume ratio of an optical fiber, and good spatial mode quality can be ensured by its waveguiding property. Therefore, a fiber-based laser system is considered to be the preferred laser architecture.<br /> The main theme of this thesis is the development of various femtosecond monolithic Yb-doped fiber chirped-pulse-amplification (FCPA) system and their applications. We demonstrate an ultrafast high-energy monolithic Yb-doped FCPA system in which the pulse fidelity is preserved by weakening the nonlinear effects via a substantial level of temporal stretching of the seed pulses and by using highly doped active fibers as amplifying media. The presented monolithic FCPA delivers up to ~25µJ diffraction-limited pulses that can be recompressed to sub-200 fs duration, and the pulse quality has been confirmed through the second-harmonic-generation (SHG) conversion efficiency of over 52%.<br />Improved dispersion and nonlinearity management schemes of the FCPA system allowing substantial pulse energy scaling in the monolithic format as well as methods for overcoming a series of technological challenges are reported.<br /> Three different types of Yb-doped fiber oscillators have been developed and built in the course of this PhD work. First, we compare two oscillator types that are based on the all-normal-dispersion (ANDi) regime and the dispersion-managed (DM) regime. Both of them have been tested as the seed-pulse source of the monolithic Yb-doped FCPA system.<br />Then we introduce another novel design based on higher-order-mode (HOM) dispersion management that competes with a solid-state oscillator seeder in terms of the pulse fidelity and pulse energy while offering the robustness of a fiber oscillator. Finally, a broadband difference-frequency converter is demonstrated, by employing the monolithic Yb-doped FCPA system as a robust and efficient front-end for a two-stage optical parametric amplifier (OPA) system.<br />This converter is able to emit carrier-envelope-offset-free pulses with energy of tens of ~nJ that is tunable in the wavelength range from 1200 nm to beyond 2 um. The measurement results of the OPA output phase stability, through spectral broadening in a piece of single mode fiber together with a so-called f-to-2f interferometer, prove the passive carrier-envelope-phase stability nature of this OPA system.