Environmentally Stable 1.56-μm Femtosecond Laser System With Discontinuous Selectable Repetition Rate

Abstract

We demonstrate here an environmentally stable and compact Er-doped fiber laser system capable of delivering sub-100-fs pulse duration with discontinuous selectable repetition rate from 10 to 70 MHz. This laser source employs a SESAM harmonic modelocked soliton laser to facilitate tunable repetition rate. A single-mode-fiber (SMF) amplifier and a double-cladding-fiber (DCF) amplifier (both with double-pass configuration) bridged by a three-stage YVO 4-based divider are used to manage the dispersion map and boost the seed pulses. With the help of ×8 replicas, the seed pulses are simultaneously amplified and compressed with 90% recombining efficiency, generating 4.60-nJ pulse energy at 10 MHz and 6.13-nJ pulse energy at 70 MHz. The main advantage of the proposed laser system is that when pulse repetition rate is switched on-demand, the pulse duration can be kept almost unchanged only by simply adjusting the pump powers of the fiber amplifiers, instead of changing any optical device (the spacing between gratings or the length of fibers).