Abstract

Photonic-crystal fibers (PCFs)^1,2 offer an unprecedented control over waveguide dispersion. In fiber-laser technologies, this unique property of PCFs helps to balance the group delay inside fiber oscillators^3,4 and compress chirped highpeak-power laser output.⁵ This work aims at developing a PCF-based stretcher for a sub-mJ fiber chirped pulse amplifier (FCPA) capable of correcting the higher-order dispersion of the amplifier chain and the pulse compressor. We develop a conveniently formalized algorithm for the design of PCFs and prove theoretically the possibility to engineer negative dispersion PCFs of a chosen sign of cubic and quartic phase. Further, we characterize several of-the-shelf negative dispersion PCFs drawn at Uni. Bath by means of spectral interferometry (SI) that makes use of a) a short femtosecond and b) a stretched nanosecond pulses to verily the influence of the nonlinear phase distortion in a prototype PCF pulse stretcher.

© 2007 IEEE