Vol. 25, No. 15 | 24 Jul 2017 | OPTICS EXPRESS 18410
Optimal design of similariton fiber lasers without gain-bandwidth limitation XINGLIANG LI, SHUMIN ZHANG,* AND ZHENJUN YANG College of Physics Science and Information Engineering, Hebei Advanced Thin Films Laboratory, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang 050024, China *
[email protected]
Abstract: We have numerically investigated broadband high-energy similariton fiber lasers, demonstrated that the self-similar evolution of pulses can locate in a segment of photonic crystal fiber without gain-bandwidth limitation. The effects of various parameters, including the cavity length, the spectral filter bandwidth, the pump power, the length of the photonic crystal fiber and the output coupling ratio have also been studied in detail. Using the optimal parameters, a single pulse with spectral width of 186.6 nm, pulse energy of 23.8 nJ, dechirped pulse duration of 22.5 fs and dechirped pulse peak power of 1.26 MW was obtained. We believe that this detailed analysis of the behaviour of pulses in the similariton regime may have major implications in the development of broadband high-energy fiber lasers. © 2017 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (060.4370) Nonlinear optics, fibers; (140.3510) Lasers, fiber; (060.5530) Pulse propagation and temporal solitons.
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#298047 Journal © 2017
https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.25.018410 Received 13 Jun 2017; revised 17 Jul 2017; accepted 18 Jul 2017; published 20 Jul 2017
Vol. 25, No. 15 | 24 Jul 2017 | OPTICS EXPRESS 18411
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1. Introduction Though passively mode-locked soliton fiber lasers are compact and robust compared with solid lasers, it is difficult to achieve high-power optical pulses since small mode field area of the fiber can produce large nonlinear phase shifts. Excessive nonlinearity can then result in optical wave breaking [1,2]. In contrast to solitons, a new class of solutions to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with gain – the self-similar pulse, which has a parabolic temporal profile, can tolerate strong nonlinearity without wave breaking. Besides being free of wave breaking, self-similar pulses also have linear chirp which can lead to highly efficient pulse compression. As a result, self-similar pulses have attracted much attention since Fermann et al. applied self-similarity methods to study pulse propagation in normal-dispersion fiber amplifiers [3]. Subsequently, Kruglov et al. also used self-similarity methods [4], and confirmed that similariton pulses can be compressed by 2 orders of magnitude in a dispersiondecreasing Raman-pumped fiber amplifier [5]. The self-similar propagation of ultrashort parabolic pulses in a laser resonator was theoretically predicted, and experimentally observed by Ilday et al. [6]. Oktem et al. reported a dispersion-managed fiber laser in which the modelocked pulse evolved as a similariton pulse in the gain segment, and this pulse was subsequently referred to as the amplifier similariton [7]. Renninger et al. observed parabolic amplifier similaritons inside a normal-dispersion fiber laser, and had demonstrated that amplifier similariton evolution can also yield practical features such as parabolic output pulses with high energies [8]. Though parabolic amplifier-similariton lasers can produce high energy pulses with high pump power, the spectral width is restricted by the bandwidth of the gain medium [9,10], which presents a clear challenge to the generation of ultrafast (
