Agile femtosecond synchronizable laser source from a gated CW laser

Abstract

Abstract In this letter we demonstrate agile femtosecond pulse generation with a widely tunable repetition rate (10–100 MHz) from a continuous wave laser diode optically gated by a Mach–Zehnder electro-optic intensity modulator. Initial sub-50 ps pulses are strongly spectral broadened (>5 nm) by self-phase modulation in a polarization maintaining single-mode fiber. A tunable optical pulse train with pulse durations of a few hundred femtoseconds is obtained using a simple fixed grating compressor, thanks to spectral broadening saturation phenomena. The source is easily synchronized with low timing jitter using an external clock signal.