All-fibre wavelength versatile short pulsed laser sources

Abstract

Pulsed lasers operating in the picosecond or femtosecond regimes find a wide range of applications in optical sciences, such as spectroscopy, laser surgery, material processing and optical communications. Among the existing sources of short-pulses, mode-locked fibre lasers play an important role mainly due to their robust and compact nature, and also due to their ability to generate outputs over a wide range of repetition-rates, pulse durations, pulse shapes, peak powers and optical wavelengths.

Considering the case of wavelength versatility, Raman amplification can be used to fill the spectral gaps that are not covered by the emission band of traditional rare-earth doped elements such as ytterbium and erbium, allowing the generation of light at unconventional wavelengths. Additionally, another contribution has come from the recent development of new nanomaterials such as graphene and carbon nanotubes that can be used as saturable absorbers over a broadband wavelength range.

The experimental work reported in this thesis is mainly focused in combining the wavelength versatility allowed by Raman gain and carbon nanotubes and graphene to generate short-pulsed fibre lasers at different wavelengths. High power ytterbium and erbium lasers and also a high power Raman laser operating at 1450 nm are used as pump sources to seed the Raman gain and carbon nanotubes and graphene are the saturable absorbers used as mode-lockers. All the fibres utilized in the oscillators are highly non-linear single mode silica fibres doped with GeO2.

The lasers operate in the dissipative soliton regime, generating chirped pulses with durations on the order of hundred of picosecond that are suitable for external compression. We demonstrate for example an erbium-pumped Raman oscillator generating 500 ps pulses that are linearly compressed to 2 ps. The results presented in this document are a contribution towards making fibre based lasers more universal devices in terms of wavelength operation.