Electronic synchronization of gain-switched laser diode seeded fiber amplifiers

L. Abrardi, T. Feurer

Abstract

We present a hybrid laser system based on all-fiber amplification of a gain-switched laser diode. The diode emits low energy pulses with several tens of picoseconds pulse duration at a wavelength of 1550 nm and a repetition rate of 1 MHz. The three-stage fiber amplifier reaches an overall gain of 55 dB boosting the pulse energy to 0.48 μJ. Much care is taken to preserve an almost bandwidth limited pulse with a spectral width of 0.1 nm and negligible spectral broadening due to nonlinearities. The laser system has been designed such that two or more can be electronically synchronized with the aim to combine them for exploring frequency mixing scenarios. Here, we report first cross-correlation measurements of two synchronized laser systems and present a method to characterize the relative timing-jitter.