• Chinese Optics Letters
  • Vol. 9, Issue 4, 041401 (2011)
Zhi Yang1,2, Xiaohong Hu1, Yishan Wang1, Wei Zhang1, and Wei Zhao1
Author Affiliations
  • 1State Key Laboratory of Transient Optics and Photonics, Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710119, China
  • 2Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
  • show less
    DOI: 10.3788/COL201109.041401 Cite this Article Set citation alerts
    Zhi Yang, Xiaohong Hu, Yishan Wang, Wei Zhang, Wei Zhao, "Millijoule pulse energy picosecond fiber chirped-pulse amplification system," Chin. Opt. Lett. 9, 041401 (2011) Copy Citation Text show less

    Abstract

    The efficient generation of a 1.17-mJ laser pulse with 360 ps duration using an ytterbium (Yb)-doped fiber amplifier chain seeded by a homemade mode-locked fiber laser is demonstrated experimentally. A specially designed figure-of-eight fiber laser acts as the seed source of a chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) system and generates mode-locked pulses with hundreds of picosecond widths. Two kinds of large-mode-area (LMA) double-clad Yb-doped fibers are employed to construct the pre-amplifier and main amplifier. All of the adopted instruments help avoid severe nonlinearity in fibers to raise sub-nanosecond pulse energy with acceptable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The output spectrum of this fiber-based CPA system shows that amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) is suppressed to better than 30 dB, and the onset of stimulated Raman scattering is excluded.