Abstract

Although the Raman fiber amplifiers are attractive for their unique advantages and various Raman fiber amplifiers in continuous wave (CW) regime were built, there are a few fundamental limitations for short-pulsed Raman fiber amplifiers. In this paper, we present a theoretical and experimental study on a novel method termed picosecond (ps) coherent Raman fiber amplification, where the stimulated Raman scattering is employed to generate high-quality femtosecond pulses from narrowband ps pump pulses, with high conversion efficiency and compact construction. Detailed numerical simulation reveals the nonlinear dynamics of the ps-coherent Raman fiber amplification in an Yb-doped gain fiber. The spectral filtering effect induced by finite Raman gain bandwidth significantly improves the temporal quality of the generated Raman pulses, similar to the well-known Mamyshev regenerator. By employing this method in a 4.5 m Yb-doped polarization maintaining double-clad fiber, 67 nJ, 76 fs nearly transmission limited Raman pulses are generated from narrowband (<2 nm) ps pump pulses, which have obvious pedestal. The corresponding peak power is close to 1 MW and the conversion efficiency reaches ∼30%. Simulations also indicate that this method can be trivially adapted to other passive fibers with normal group-velocity dispersion. This simple and compact scheme, which combines the Raman fiber amplifier and Mamyshev regenerator, could be attractive for applications in ultrafast science and technology.

© 2018 IEEE

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