Programmable lasers: design and applications

A rapidly tunable, electronically controlled, pulse duration adjustable, arbitrarily programmable wavelength, picosecond mode-locked fiber laser is presented. The laser is tunable over 80 nm with sweeping frequency over 10 million wavelengths per second. The user can select from a preset linear sweep in either wavelength or optical frequency (kspace) or a custom (user-defined) sweep. Pulse duration is adjustable over tens of picoseconds with nearly Fourier limited linewidth. The laser can be harmonically mode-locked over 1 GHz. The average power is again fully programmable and is at least 50 mW, Watt level is possible with a high power amplifier. The output is a single mode polarization maintaining fiber. The laser possesses several external triggers, such as one trigger per optical pulse, one delayed trigger per optical pulse to synchronize with the experiments, one at the beginning when the laser is ready to sweep to start the data acquisition and one for each consecutive sweep, and finally one trigger for each wavelength change. Such a laser is so versatile that it can be used for medical imaging, material machining and nonlinear optics. It proves also a valuable research tool since all the parameters are adjustable.

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