Propagation and compression of high power parabolic pulses generated in a high gain Yb:doped fibre amplifier

Abstract

Summary form only given. The amplification of ultrashort pulses to high powers in optical fiber amplifiers is usually associated with severe pulse distortion due to optical wave-breaking, limiting the usefulness of such amplifiers in ultrafast optics. For sufficiently high gain, however, an incident ultrashort pulse in a fiber amplifier with normal dispersion evolves into a a parabolic pulse which propagates in a wave-breaking free manner. Here, we report the first experimental generation and characterization of such parabolic pulses using frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG). The pulses retain their parabolic profile after self-similar propagation in standard fiber and are compressed to 70 fs pulses with 80 kW peak power.