Abstract

We have recently developed a method for producing voltage programmable, arbitrarily shaped laser pulses with roughly 100 fs resolution¹. A waveguide intensity modulator was fabricated from BaTiO₃ and incorporated inside a fiber-grating pulse compressor (after the fiber, before the grating pair). The modulator is driven by an arbitrary waveform generator which creates voltage programmable microwave pulses.² A single mode fiber chirps and temporally broadens a transform limited 6 ps pulse to ≈120 ps. This pulse is long enough to be tailored by the modulator, which has an electrical bandwidth of 19.5 GHz (-6dB). Optical pulses with sin(x)/x and square envelopes were synthesized to demonstrate the technique (Figure 1).

© 1988 Optical Society of America