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We present a fiber-based optical parametric oscillator (FOPO) pumped by a fiber-coupled laser diode. The FOPO consisted of a photonic crystal fiber to convert the pump pulses via four-wave mixing and a dispersive resonator formed by a single-mode fiber. Via dispersion filtering, output pulses with a bandwidth of about 3 nm, a temporal duration of about 8 ps and a pulse energy of up to 22 nJ could be generated. By changing the repetition frequency of the pump laser diode by about ±1  kHz, the wavelength of the output pulses could be tuned between 1130 and 1310 nm within 8 μs, without the need to change the length of the resonator. Therewith, the FOPO should especially be suited for hyperspectral imaging, while its all-electronic control constitutes a promising approach to a turnkey and alignment-free light source.

Abstract:We present the experimental realization of transverse mode conversion in an optical fiber via an optically induced long-period grating. The transient gratings are generated by femtosecond laser pulses, exploiting the Kerr effect to translate intensity patterns emerging from multimode interference into a spatial refractive index modulation. Since these modulations exist only while the pump beam is present, they can be used for optical switching of transverse modes. As only a localized part of the grating was written at a time and the probe beam was co-propagating with the pump beam the required pulse energies could be reduced to 120 nJ which is about a factor of 600 lower than in previous quasi-continuous-wave experiments. Accompanying numerical simulations allow a better understanding of the involved effects and show excellent agreement to the experimental results.

We present in-line interferometric femtosecond stimulated Raman scattering (II-FSRS), a new method to measure the spectral Raman intensity and phase over a broad spectral range, potentially in a single shot. An analytic model is developed, that excellently reproduces the measured spectra. Additionally, the performance of II-FSRS is directly compared in experiments to two established techniques, namely femtosecond stimulated Raman scattering and femtosecond Raman induced Kerr-effect spectroscopy.