Pulse Laser Physics: Constructing a Stretched Pulse Fiber Laser and Autocorrelator

Creation of laser pulses in the sub picosecond range has become increasingly important over the past couple of decades as the number of applications for ultrashort laser pulses has expanded. There are a number of ways to create sub picoseconds laser pulses; one such method is to use a stretched pulse fiber laser. This method is advantageous because stretched pulse fiber lasers are relatively inexpensive to build, compact, and operate efficiently. For practical purposes, it is also important to be able to characterize and measure sub picosecond pulses, especially their temporal duration. Due to the incredibly short duration of such pulses standard detection methods will not work. A solution to this problem is to use techniques which marginalize the slow response of the detector, one such technique being autocorrelation. This study has identified a number of important features essential to producing both a stretched pulse fiber laser and autocorrelator. At this point in time, we have created a stable stretched pulse fiber laser but have not been able to produce an autocorrelation of the laser pulses. Consequently, we do not exactly know the temporal duration of the laser pulses produced by the stretched pulse fiber laser.