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US 2020/0052455 A1Published application
High-energy femtosecond light pulses based on a gain-switched laser diode
AssigneeCornell University
InventorsWalter FU, Frank W. Wise, Logan Wright
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Abstract
This disclosed subject matter allows short pulses with high peak powers to be obtained from seed pulses generated by a gain-switched diode. The gain-switched diode provides a highly stable source for optical systems such as nonlinear microscopy. The disclosed system preserves the ability to generate pulses at arbitrary repetition rates, or even pulses on demand, which can help reduce sample damage in microscopy experiments or control deliberate damage in material processing.
Claims19
A pulsed laser device, comprising:
- a seed laser including a gain-switched diode laser to produce seed laser pulses;
- a self-phase modulation device located in a path of the seed laser pulses to produce a self-phase modulation on each of the seed laser pulses to generate spectral fringes in the seed laser pulses as self-phase modulated seed laser pulses;
- a spectral filter located downstream from the self-phase modulation device that isolates a spectral region of the self-phase modulated seed laser pulses, wherein the spectral filter performs pulse reshaping and compression in the temporal domain;
- a reshaping device providing self-phase modulation and normal group-velocity dispersion located downstream of the spectral filter to receive the filtered seed laser pulses and to nonlinearly reshape the filtered seed laser pulses into reshaped light pulses having a parabolic waveform;
- an optical amplifier to amplify the reshaped light pulses out of the reshaping device as amplified light pulses;
- and
- a dechirping device located downstream from the optical amplifier to cause dechirping of the amplified light pulse to generate near transform-limit output laser pulses with an amplified peak power.
4 more elements
A method of generating ultra-short duration laser pulses, the method comprising:
- generating seed pulses of light;
- performing nonlinear spectral-temporal filtering on the seed pulses of light to generate filtered light pulses;
- propagating the filtered light pulses through a predetermined length of normally-dispersive nonlinear medium to generate parabolic pulses with a parabolic temporal intensity;
- amplifying the parabolic pulses to generate amplified pulses, wherein the amplifying is performed by a non-linear amplifier;
- and
- performing dechirping on the amplified pulses to generate output pulses.
3 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.