All-fiber supercontinuum source based on a mode-locked ytterbium laser with dispersion compensation by linearly chirped Bragg grating

We demonstrate an all-fiber picosecond soliton laser with dispersion management performed by a chirped Bragg grating that generates similar to 1.6 ps pulses representing the shortest pulsewidth reported to date using this technology. The large anomalous dispersion provided by the grating allows building of a long-length cavity laser with an extremely low fundamental repetition rate of 2.6 MHz. This source allows us to use an original approach for producing energetic pulses that after boosting in a medium power core-pumped amplifier produce an octave-spanning supercontinuum radiation in a nonlinear photonic crystal fiber. (c) 2008 Optical Society of America.