Ultra-broadband fiber optical parametric amplifier pumped by chirped pulses

Abstract

We numerically and experimentally demonstrate ultra-broadband fiber optical parametric amplification in a microstructured fiber pumped by stretched short pulses. The chirped pump pulse induces a temporally spread spectral gain suitable for optical parametric chirped pulse amplification in fibers. Numerical simulation shows ~45 dB flat gain with more than 70 nm bandwidth, allowing sub-35 fs pulse amplification around 1 μm with reduced gain narrowing. This amplification principle is experimentally confirmed by measuring the instantaneous spectral gain band and related chirp.

Normal-dispersion fiber optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification

“…Thus, seeding a CW signal results in a broadband idler that mimics the pump's phase up to a factor of two. This behavior has been previously observed and studied [23,24,33], and is furthermore evident in our simulations ( Fig. 1), validating the assumption of negligible GVD and GVM.…”

“…Temporally stretching the pulses prior to parametric amplification and subsequently recompressing them helps reduce unwanted nonlinear distortions, while the use of larger stretching factors offers tremendous scalability. Furthermore, chirping the pump gives rise to a chirped parametric gain profile where different processes are phasematched at each point in time, permitting the overall gain spectrum to be very broad [23][24][25]. Since FOPCPA was proposed, several groups have experimentally demonstrated FOPCPA systems [23][24][25][26][27][28][29].…”

All-fiber high-power 1700 nm femtosecond laser based on optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification

“…However, because of the nonlinearity of the fiber, the power scaling of the FOPO approach can be very challenging, leaving the output power levels around the milli-Watt range. To further increase the output power, the use of fiber optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifier (FOPCPA) has been proposed [20][21][22][23][24][25], which combines chirped-pulse amplification and parametric interaction to achieve high power amplification inside the fiber. In [26], microjoulelevel pulses have been produced with a FOPCPA, which shows great energy scalability of the approach.…”

Temporal Distribution Measurement of the Parametric Spectral Gain in a Photonic Crystal Fiber Pumped by a Chirped Pulse

“…The strong pump pulse has a relatively long duration (tens of ps to ns) to match the one of the stretched signals [5,[7][8][9]. More recently, several configurations of fiber-based OPA (FOPA) have been performed to amplify a very large spectral width at high gain [10][11][12][13] or a narrower band at high energy in the µJ range [14][15][16]. In particular, we have shown that ultra-broad band parametric amplification at high gain can be obtained by using a single pump stretched pulse with a relatively broad spectrum [10,11].…”