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Several new directions for ultrafast fiber lasers [Invited]

Walter Fu, Logan G. Wright, Pavel Sidorenko, Sterling Backus, and Frank W. Wise

Open Access Open Access

Abstract

Ultrafast fiber lasers have the potential to make applications of ultrashort pulses widespread – techniques not only for scientists, but also for doctors, manufacturing engineers, and more. Today, this potential is only realized in refractive surgery and some femtosecond micromachining. The existing market for ultrafast lasers remains dominated by solid-state lasers, primarily Ti:sapphire, due to their superior performance. Recent advances show routes to ultrafast fiber sources that provide performance and capabilities equal to, and in some cases beyond, those of Ti:sapphire, in compact, versatile, low-cost devices. In this paper, we discuss the prospects for future ultrafast fiber lasers built on new kinds of pulse generation that capitalize on nonlinear dynamics. We focus primarily on three promising directions: mode-locked oscillators that use nonlinearity to enhance performance; systems that use nonlinear pulse propagation to achieve ultrashort pulses without a mode-locked oscillator; and multimode fiber lasers that exploit nonlinearities in space and time to obtain unparalleled control over an electric field.

© 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

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Figures (11)
Fig. 1
Fig. 1 Outline of this paper, placed in historical context with the novel ideas and design elements that form a foundation for these results, and the applications that may follow. In the future, we see a variety of new source capabilities and features (listed from near- to long-term in descending order on the right) that may result from future combinations of these and other ongoing research directions.

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Fig. 2
Fig. 2 Progress in the peak power of various types of fiber oscillators [6–25]. Each result is normalized to standard, single-mode fiber (6-µm core diameter), and assumes 75% compressor efficiency where necessary. Several points contain elements of multiple pulse evolutions, and have been colored accordingly. The typical range of peak powers obtained from current, commercial Ti:sapphire oscillators is marked for comparison. Differently-colored regions of the vertical axis denote the peak power approximately required for the exemplary applications described to the right of the plot.

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Fig. 3
Fig. 3 Schematic of a single-pass Mamyshev regenerator. A high-intensity pulse (P1) and a low-intensity pulse (P2) experience different levels of spectral broadening in a fiber, causing the latter to be preferentially attenuated by a spectrally offset bandpass filter (BPF; dashed red line).

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Fig. 4
Fig. 4 Schematic of a Mamyshev oscillator. The cavity comprises two Mamyshev regenerator (MR) arms, each containing a bandpass filter (BPF) at a different wavelength.

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Fig. 5
Fig. 5 Illustrations of the major features of several non-mode-locked pulse generation techniques.

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Fig. 6
Fig. 6 Illustration of a Mamyshev regenerator’s ability to accept a long pulse with a complicated pedestal (solid green), spectrally broaden it (solid blue, and spectrogram), and convert it into a short, pedestal-free pulse (dashed red).

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Fig. 7
Fig. 7 Performance of various nonlinear compression schemes. Ovals indicate the approximate regime over which each technique typically produces transform-limited, pedestal-free pulses. Data are from [84–86,94,97,107,111,115,116,118–131].

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Fig. 8
Fig. 8 Simulated self-similar evolution in a lossless, dispersion-decreasing FBG, including third-order dispersive effects. (a) Seeded, 100-nJ, 40-ps pulse with a complicated spectral phase (dot-dashed red), and the parabolic output (solid black). (b) Output pulse after dechirping to near the 5-ps transform limit. (c) Output spectrum. (d) Longitudinal evolution of the pulse spectrum and the FBG stopband. (e) Dispersion-decreasing profile resulting from the varying Bragg wavelength.

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Fig. 9
Fig. 9 Key phenomena for multimode ultrafast lasers and future light sources based on multimode fiber. (a) Propagation in one or a small number of higher-order modes (HOMs) can provide, for example, a means of phase-matching different nonlinear processes (such as the intermodal four-wave mixing process shown as an example), or propagating long distances with controllable dispersion and large mode area. (b) Nonlinear beam cleanup causes an initially-multimode field to adjust into one dominated by the fundamental, Gaussian-like mode of the waveguide. (c) Spatiotemporal mode-locking can occur in laser cavities supporting multiple transverse modes. In the continuous-wave lasing state (left), the resonant lasing modes are complex, corresponding approximately to many transverse families of differently-spaced longitudinal modes. With spatiotemporal mode-locking (right), these modes nonlinearly lock together into phased frequency combs, resulting in coherent multimode pulses.

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Fig. 10
Fig. 10 Examples of future light sources based on multimode fiber. (a) By adjusting the initial modes excited, and with a low-power tunable visible source (e.g., filtered continuum from photonic crystal fiber), a multitude of nonlinear processes in a highly multimode chalcogenide or hollow-core fiber can be harnessed for generating tailored light from the visible into the mid-infrared. (b) Nonlinear beam cleanup may be used to improve the beam quality of very-high-average-power (e.g., ns-pulses or continuous-wave) fiber lasers amplified in multimode fiber, or suffering from thermal modal instability. (c) If spatiotemporal mode-locking can be understood and controlled, multimode lasers will provide a route to high-power ultrafast pulses, and a platform for full control of coherent electromagnetic fields in spacetime, frequency, and across many fundamental oscillation periods of the MM cavity. A hypothetical route to achieving this control is depicted, wherein modal multiplexing and demultiplexing are used so that each mode can be individually modulated, filtered, delayed, etc. before recombination.

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Fig. 11
Fig. 11 Modal dispersion management realized by a double-pass through a multimode fiber. By exchanging the pulse from mode A into mode B, and vice versa, the net modal dispersion can be eliminated. To achieve a controllable net modal dispersion, many more modes could be included, or the backward pass here could be replaced by propagation in a different-length fiber. An all-fiber design might be realized using fiber Bragg gratings.

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Equations (1)

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φ NL (L)= ω c ∫ 0 L n 2 I(z)dz
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