Abstract

Optical pulse compression utilizing self-phase modulation (SPM) to chirp the pulse in a single-mode fiber followed by a grating-pair dispersive delay line has been very successful in compressing dye laser pulses. The technique has resulted in optical pulses as short as 30 fsec (Ref. 1) and a 65X two-stage compression of synchronously mode-locked dye laser pulses to 90 fsec.² We report an 80X single-stage compression of 240 W, 33-psec duration optical pulses from a cw mode-locked frequency-doubled Nd:YAG laser to 1.2 kW, 410-fsec duration optical pulses. The compression of these 0.532 µm optical pulses has resulted in the largest single-stage compression factor reported to date. These results demonstrate the production of femtosecond optical pulses directly from relatively long optical pulses without the use of a mode-locked dye laser.

© 1984 Optical Society of America