eXtreme chirped pulse oscillator operating in the nanosecond stretched pulse regime

An eXtreme Chirped Pulse Oscillator (XCPO) implemented with a Theta cavity and based on a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is presented for generating 10ns frequency-swept pulses and 3.6ps compressed pulses directly from the oscillator. In this experiment, we show the two distinct characteristics of the XCPO which are the scalability of the output energy and the mode-locked spectrum. By using these characteristics, we obtain a pulse energy of 58.4pJ from the stretched pulse and a mode-locked optical bandwidth of 14.6nm (10dB) directly from the oscillator. The laser cavity design allows for low repetition rate operation < 100MHz, as well. The cavity, significantly, reduces nonlinear carrier dynamics, integrated self phase modulation (SPM), and fast gain recovery in an SOA. Due to the laser's ability to generate directly frequency-swept pulses from the oscillator, this oscillator can be used for high speed frequency-swept optical coherence tomography (OCT) and time-stretched photonic analog to digital converters (P-ADC). (c) 2008 Optical Society of America.