A novel structure that converts wasted backward amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) to seed photons for the amplifier stage is suggested for a high-power erbium-doped fiber (EDF) broadband source. A considerable increase in output power and bandwidth extension was achieved by placement of a segment of passive EDF in front of the amplifier stage, thus recycling backward ASE as the secondary pum...

We report the first Fourier domain modelocked (FDML) laser constructed using optical parametric amplifier (OPA) in conjunction with an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), centered at approximately 1555 nm, to the best of our knowledge. We utilize a one-pump OPA and a C-band EDFA in serial configuration with a tunable Fabry-Perot interferometer to generate a hybrid FDML spectrum. Results demons...

We report on an airborne demonstration of atmospheric oxygen optical depth measurements with an IPDA lidar using a fiber-based laser system and a photon counting detector. Accurate knowledge of atmospheric temperature and pressure is required for NASA's Active Sensing of CO2 Emissions over Nights, Days, and Seasons (ASCENDS) space mission, and climate modeling studies. The lidar uses a doubled ...

We design and demonstrate a high repetition-rate similariton generation system using normal dispersion fiber amplifiers (NDFA’s). We numerically calculate the pulse evolution in NDFA’s and clarify the condition to generate similariton pulses in a finite-length NDFA. Then we design the similariton generation system in consideration of the use of Erbium-doped fibers (EDF’s) and show that a km-lon...

Improvements in the power level of sources near 1550 nm and in the efficiency of waveguide frequency doublers enabled us to lock a frequency-doubled source directly to the 5S(1/2) ? 5D(5/2) two-photon transitions near 778 nm. We obtained a sufficiently powerful second-harmonic signal, exceeding 2 mW, by doubling an external-cavity diode laser that was amplified by an erbium-doped fiber amplifie...

Silicon microphotonics has emerged as the leading technology to overcome the interconnect bottleneck that limits a further increase of computation power following Moore's law. Optical interconnects between different electronic microprocessors in an electronic-photonic integrated circuit (EPIC) can provide a fast, low-loss and highbandwidth alternative to electrical interconnects, which suffer f...

We present an ultrahigh-speed optical coherence tomography (OCT) based on an all-optical swept-source with an A-scan rate of 40 MHz. The inertia-free swept-source, which has its output power of 41.2 mW and tuning range of 40 nm and high scan linearity in wavenumber with Pearson's correlation coefficients r of 0.9996, consists of a supercontinuum laser, an optical band-pass filter, a linearly ch...