Ultra short pulse fiber lasers are widely used in many photonic systems for industrial, biomedical and scientific applications. Popularity of these lasers rapidly developed due to increment in demand of shorter pulses for various applications like communication, ophthalmology, micromachining, medical imaging and precision metrology. Pulsed fiber laser can produce ultra short pulses in order of pico or femto second. Mode locking technique is widely used in rare earth doped fiber lasers to produce such ultra short pulses of light. In this paper, pulsed operation of fiber laser was studied experimentally at 1 micron region. Experiment on pulsed fiber laser has been done using ytterbium (Yb) doped active fiber. Using the principle of passive mode locking, a 2.3 pico-second pulse was produced at 1064nm wavelength. A semiconductor saturable absorber mirror was used to mode lock the laser. The spectral domain data showed that the pulse was not Fourier transform limited which means the pulse was chirped. Chirped pulse amplification systems exploit this pulse characteristic for power scaling of ultra-short pico- second to femto-second pulses.
On the study of pulse evolution in ultra-short pulse mode-locked fiber lasers by numerical simulations
