Dresden 2011 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 36: Laseranwendungen und Photonik 1
Q 36.2: Vortrag
Mittwoch, 16. März 2011, 14:45–15:00, SCH 251
Optical mode structure of a harmonically mode-locked Yb femtosecond fiber laser — •Simon Herr1,2, Tilo Steinmetz1,2, Tobias Wilken1, Martin Engelbrecht2, Theodor W. Hänsch1, Thomas Udem1, and Ronald Holzwarth1,2 — 1Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, 85748 Garching, Germany — 2Menlo Systems GmbH, Am Klopferspitz 19a, 82152 Martinsried, Germany
Due to their ease of use, fiber lasers provide an excellent source for ultrashort pulses and are well suited for frequency comb generation. The need for an extended fiber section, however, restricts the repetition rate and the mode spacing of a fundamentally mode-locked fiber laser to about 1 GHz, thus limiting their potential for applications where even larger mode spacings are required such as the calibration of astronomical spectrographs. Passive harmonically mode-locked (HML) fiber lasers on the other hand have produced repetition rates up to 7.2 GHz and have recently been proposed for this application.
In this work we investigate the optical mode structure of a passive HML Yb femtosecond fiber laser and show that all modes are oscillating with equal intensity. This is possible when the the spectral phase follows a quadratic distribution and is favored over suppression of modes due to the inhomogeneously broadened gain of the laser. Our findings emphasize the need of a mode selection mechanism, such as a Fabry-Perot cavity, for frequency domain applications of passive HML lasers.