Semiconductor lasers with fiber delay lines generate 60 ps pulses

June 3, 2013
Munich, Germany--Researchers at the Technische Universität Muenchen (TUM) and LMU Munich have created cheap, robust semiconductor lasers that can produce high-energy light pulses as short as 60 ps without the drawbacks of previous approaches in terms of power consumption and device size.
Robert Huber and Christian Jirauschek with their lab equipment. (Image: Heddergott and Benz, copyright TUM)


Munich, Germany--Researchers at the Technische Universität Muenchen (TUM) and LMU Munich have created cheap, robust semiconductor lasers that can produce high-energy light pulses as short as 60 ps without the drawbacks of previous approaches in terms of power consumption and device size.1

The device is a Fourier domain mode-locked (FDML) laser, which means it sweeps through a range of optical frequencies at a 390 kHz repetition rate; its laser cavity includes a kilometer-long energy-storage fiber. Outside the cavity is another fiber, this one with a dispersion that causes the light from each continuous-wave frequency sweep to "pile up" (temporally compress) into a single 60 to 70 ps pulse.

The storage of the laser energy in the long fiber, rather than the small piece of semiconductor, means that a low-power oscillator can produce high-energy pulses.

And the devices could soon be producing femtosecond pulses. "Our models and simulations actually let us identify changes in the experimental setup that could yield a further thousandfold improvement in performance," says Christian Jirauschek of TUM, "potentially producing pulses shorter than 30 fs."

REFERENCE:

1. Christoph M. Eigenwillig et al., Nature Communications 4, No. 1848, 14 May 2013. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2870

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