We describe the Optical Pulse Generation (OPG) testbed, which is the integration of the MOR and Preamplifier Development Laboratories. We use this OPG testbed to develop and demonstrate the overall capabilites of the NIF laser system front end. We will present the measured energy and power output, temporal and spatial pulse shaping capability, FM bandwidth and dispersion for beam smoothing, and...

The impact of forward and backward amplification schemes on the generation of optical similaritons has been numerically and experimentally investigated around 1550 nm using a fiber based Raman amplifier. The pumping configuration does not affect the similariton nature of the output pulse, but it significantly influences the characteristics of the pulse. Shorter and higher peak-power similariton...

We observed generation of stable picoseconds pulse train and double-scale optical lumps with picosecond envelope and femtosecond noise-like oscillations in the same Yb-doped fiber laser with all-positive-dispersion cavity mode-locked due to the effect of non-linear polarization evolution. In the noise-like pulse generation regime the auto-correlation function has a non-usual double (femto- and ...

Short pulse generation requires a wide phase-locked spectrum. Earlier the short pulses were obtained by expanding the spectrum of a mode locked laser from self phase modulation (SPM) in an optical fiber and then compensating for group velocity dispersion (GVD) by diffraction grating and prism pairs. Pulses as short as 4.4 fs have been generated (Steinmeyer et al., 1999). For ultrafast measureme...

A novel technique to generate ultrashort fundamental solitons is proposed and demonstrated numerically. The technique utilizes both the multisoliton pulse-compression effect and the switching characteristics of a nonlinear optical loop mirror constructed from dispersion-decreasing fiber. We show that, in contrast to the conventional soliton-effect pulse compression in which compressed pulses ar...

In an ultrahigh speed OTDM system, picosecond or subpicosecond optical data pulses are transmitted through a fibre link. The optical pulses used in such OTDM systems should have the following characteristics: narrow pulsewidth, high extinction ratio, small timing jitter, repetition-rate tunability, and long term stability. Up to now, several techniques have been developed to produce optical pul...

We report an experimental demonstration of optical parametric generation in a periodically poled KTiOPO4 crystal based on the principle of mirrorless optical parametric oscillation. A femtosecond pump pulse spectrally centered at 792 nm from a Ti:sapphire amplifier is prechirped to minimize Kerr effects. The pump pulse is then injected into the nonlinear crystal and down converted to signal and...