Theoretical and experimental investigations of novel fiber lasers.

Ultrafast science has historically been concerned with the areas of spectroscopy and the study of dynamic processes in the sciences and engineering. With the recent advent of compact, economical sources of ultrashort optical pulses, many potential applications have emerged in the fields of communications, medicine, metrology, and industrial processing. In this thesis, fiber lasers are explored as compact sources of ultra short optical pulses. Several passive modelocking schemes in fiber lasers have been reported. Unfortunately, when implemented in the negative group velocity regime, modelocked fiber lasers are plagued with a multiple-pulsing instability which limits them to low output pulse energy. In this work, a modelocking scheme based on a nonlinear directional coupler is proposed and analyzed. This laser, when embodied as a dual-core fiber, is shown to be immune to the multiple-pulsing instability and produces sub-100-fs pulses in the negative group velocity regime. In the presence of gain saturation, the laser produces 100-fs pulses and can evolve to steady-state from initial noise input when operated under the right conditions. The dual-core fiber laser even produces nanojoule, picosecond when implemented in the regime of positive group velocity dispersion. These pulses are chirped which allows for further compression down to 160 fs. Using a similar model, the first theoretical analysis of passive modelocking in birefringent fiber is performed. The results of the model (45 fs) are in excellent agreement with experimental results (38 fs). Additional wavelengths are also needed if fiber lasers are to be considered viable as compact sources of ultrashort pulses. To this end, a diode-pumped thulium-doped fluorozirconate fiber laser which operates near 800 nm is examined. The upconversion process is shown to be due to avalanche absorption of the pump. By constructing a compact, diode-pumped laser from an unoptimized sample of this fiber, this technique is shown to be a promising candidate for an 800-nm fiber laser. The study is concluded with research and development of a chirped pulse amplification system based on ytterbium doped fiber. Both the small and large signal gains are measured. When configured as a two-stage amplifier, this system amplifies the entire bandwidth of 100-fs pulses to the 10-$\mu$J level. These pulses are the most energetic, to date, produced from a standard single-mode fiber amplifier.PhDApplied SciencesElectrical engineeringOpticsPure SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129906/2/9635630.pd