Abstract

Many significant advances have been made recently in the generation and amplifiction of ultrashort optical pulses. Control of the oscillator dispersion and phase modulation has proven useful in improving the pulse width and pulse stability of ultrashort pulse dye lasers.¹ The additional bandwidth provided by self-phase modulation (SPM) in optical fibers has enabled the generation of ultrashort pulses by pulse compression.² Finally, new amplifier systems have been developed which allow the amplification of femtosecond pulses to the microjoule level at kilohertz repetition rates.^3,4 In this paper we report the generation of 65-fsec microjoule pulses at a high repetition rate using an actively mode-locked Nd:YAF-based system.

© 1985 Optical Society of America