Generation of sub-150 fs, 10 W-class, pedestal-free 2.07 µm ultrashort pulses using a cascade compression system

Abstract

We report high-power pedestal-free ultrashort pulses in a cascade compression system. In the self-compression stage, the 2 µm ultrashort pulses with 123 fs duration and up to 21.7 W output power were obtained in a 0.3 m 50 µm core diameter fiber. It is the highest self-compressing power ever obtained in a silica fiber with an all-fiber 2 µm laser amplifier as the pump source. To obtain purer pedestal-eliminated pulses, we further increase the fiber length to 1 m to trigger the soliton self-frequency shifting (SSFS) effect. By employing an enhanced SSFS technique based on third-order dispersion (TOD) and filtering out the unshifted signal light, we finally achieved sub-150 fs, 10 W-class, 1.2-MW peak-power, pedestal-free 2.07 µm ultrashort pulses. This is also the highest, to the best of our knowledge, power and energy of Raman soliton obtained by SSFS in an ordinary silica fiber.