Difference frequency generation of femtosecond mid infrared pulses employing intense Stokes pulses excitation in a photonic crystal fiber

Yao, Yuhong; Knox, Wayne H.

doi:10.1364/oe.20.025275

Cited by 19 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…In conclusion, we have demonstrated a femtosecond 1.3 μm wavelength converter based on efficient, low-noise, and spectrally coherent Stokes band excitation from a TZDW PCF. Seeded by 240-fs pump pulses with soliton order N > 50, the Stokes band exhibits preservation of intensity stability and spectral coherence, which not only shows promising potential toward a robust all-fiber ultrafast source that can be helpful for applications such as biomedical deep-tissue imaging, but also attests to the stability of our reported approaches for mid-IR and RGB generation [10][11][12]. With the maturity in fiber laser technology, average power of the 1.3-μm source can be further scaled up with higher repetition rate source lasers [3,5,15].…”

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confidence: 70%

“…In contrast to these two fiber types, PCF with two-ZDWs (TZDWs) offers a unique route to efficient energy transfer from the pump wavelength to two localized spectral regions beyond either side of the ZDWs [9]. In previous work, we have employed an Yb:fiber amplifier to excite an intense Stokes pulse around ∼1.26 μm from a TZDW PCF for mid-IR differencefrequency generation [10,11] and speckle-free RGB generation [12]. The ∼1.3 μm region is an important optical window for deep-tissue imaging [13] that is traditionally accessed with Cr: forsterite lasers.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Yb:fiber laser-based, spectrally coherent and efficient generation of femtosecond 13-μm pulses from a fiber with two zero-dispersion wavelengths

Yao¹,

Agrawal²,

Knox³

2015

Opt. Lett.

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We report, to the best of our knowledge, the first experimental characterization of spectral coherence properties of wavelength conversion inside photonic crystal fibers with two zero-dispersion wavelengths (TZDWs) and demonstrate a low-noise femtosecond 1.3-μm source employing the TZDW fiber and a 1.3-W, 240-fs Yb:fiber amplifier as the seeding source. Theoretical investigation shows that pulse evolution in our TZDW fiber source is dominated by parametric amplification seeded by self-phase modulation broadening which efficiently converts the pump energy into two new wavelength bands in a deterministic manner, leading to low noise and coherent excitation of femtosecond pulses tunable in the 1.3-μm spectral region, with up to 3 nJ of pulse energy at 32% of conversion efficiency.

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confidence: 70%

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confidence: 99%

Yb:fiber laser-based, spectrally coherent and efficient generation of femtosecond 13-μm pulses from a fiber with two zero-dispersion wavelengths

Yao¹,

Agrawal²,

Knox³

2015

Opt. Lett.

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“…Besides these two fiber types, PCF with two-ZDWs (TZDW) offers a unique route to efficient energy transfer from the pump wavelength to two narrow-band continua beyond either side of the ZDWs [12,13]. In previous work, we have used such fiber to excite an intense Stokes pulse around 1.26 μm with a 300-fs Yb:fiber laser for mid-IR difference frequency generation and ultrafast Red-Green-Blue generation [14][15][16][17][18]. The ~1.3 μm spectral region is an important optical window for many applications, including biomedical deep tissue imaging [19] which is in the tuning range of Cr: forsterite lasers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interferometric coherence measurement and radio frequency noise characterization of the 1.3 μm femtosecond intense Stokes continuum from a TZDW source

Yao

Knox

2015

SPIE Proceedings

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Photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with two closely spaced zero dispersion wavelengths (TZDW) offers a unique route to efficient energy transfer to two spectrally localized continua beyond either side of the ZDWs, which we have employed in previous work for mid-IR difference frequency generation and speckle-free red-green-blue generation. In this manuscript, we report the interferometric coherence characterization and radio frequency (RF) noise measurements of the Stokes side TZDW component. With a custom-built 1.3 W, 1035 nm, 40 MHz, 240 fs Yb:fiber chirped pulse amplifier as the pump source, we use 12 cm of commercially available TZDW PCF to excite the dual narrow-band continua from which the Stokes pulse is filtered out with a 1180 nm long wave pass filter. We achieve 0.8 to 3 nJ of narrow-band pulses within the spectral range of 1200 -1315 nm at an average power conversion efficiency of 33%.Employing an un-balanced Michelson interferometer, measured mutual spectral coherence of the Stokes pulse is in excess of 0.76 with pump Soliton order as high as N ~70. Its measured RF noise spectrum at the first harmonic of the laser repetition rate shows less than 8 dBc/Hz increase in relative intensity noise (RIN) compared to that of the power amplifier, which is consistent with reported studies employing sub-100 fs pulses from relatively low noise oscillators. In contrast to the broadband continuum from a single ZDW PCF wherein severe de-coherence is found with pumping at high soliton order and longer pump pulse width, the reported TZDW fiber source shows preservation of intensity stability and phase coherence against variation in pump pulse parameters, which not only attests to the stability of our reported method for mid-IR generation, but also shows promising potential towards an all-fiber, efficient and low noise ultrafast source that can be helpful for applications such as biomedical deep-tissue imaging.

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“…[10] Recently short pulse fiber laser systems have been used to generate long wavelength MIR through difference frequency mixing, but, the average power is still low. [11,12,13,14,15,16] The MIR is produced by difference frequency mixing a pump pulse from a fiber laser and a tunable second pump pulse, created by focusing some of the fiber laser output into either a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) to make a continuum [11,12] or a strong Stokes pulse [15] or an anomalous dispersion fiber to make a Raman shifted soliton pulse, [13,14] or two PCF's to have both a strong Stokes and a continuum. [16] Typically the maximum power is at a shorter wavelength of ~ 6 µm and the power decreases with increasing wavelength because the nonlinear mixing gives a constant photon conversion efficiency.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long wavelength mid-infrared from mixing two colors from a fiber amplifier

et al. 2015

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At Waterloo, we are developing a high power, short pulse, two-color, Yb:fiber amplifier system to generate the long wavelength (>15µm) side of the molecular fingerprint spectral region, by difference frequency mixing the two colors. This spectral region is important for trace gas detection of explosives. As an example, it has been shown that the strong spectroscopic signatures of a peroxide-based explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP) occur between 15 and 20 µm. To date, we have achieved a tuning range from 16 to 20 µm with a maximum average power of 1.7 mW. On the short wavelength side, the two colors would need to be pulled further apart, which requires a higher power seed to beat the amplified spontaneous emission that appears at the gain peak of the amplifiers between the two seed colors. On the long wavelength side, we are limited to 20 µm by the transparency region of the nonlinear crystals. We would like to find new nonlinear materials that have transparency from 1 to 30µm. If we could generate wavelengths from 15 to 30 µm with sufficient power, we could extend the spectral region to also cover 8 to 15µm by frequency doubling the longer wavelengths. We are currently working on replacing bulk optics in the system with fiber based optical elements to select the wavelengths as well as stretch and recompress the pulses in order to make the system compact and stable. or less. For the keywords, select up to 8 key terms for a search on your manuscript's subject.

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Difference frequency generation of femtosecond mid infrared pulses employing intense Stokes pulses excitation in a photonic crystal fiber

Cited by 19 publications

References 31 publications

Yb:fiber laser-based, spectrally coherent and efficient generation of femtosecond 13-μm pulses from a fiber with two zero-dispersion wavelengths

Yb:fiber laser-based, spectrally coherent and efficient generation of femtosecond 13-μm pulses from a fiber with two zero-dispersion wavelengths

Interferometric coherence measurement and radio frequency noise characterization of the 1.3 μm femtosecond intense Stokes continuum from a TZDW source

Long wavelength mid-infrared from mixing two colors from a fiber amplifier

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