High repetition rate tunable femtosecond pulses and broadband amplification from fiber laser pumped parametric amplifier

We report on the generation of high energy femtosecond pulses at 1 MHz repetition rate from a fiber laser pumped optical parametric amplifier ( OPA). Nonlinear bandwidth enhancement in fibers provides the intrinsically synchronized signal for the parametric amplifier. We demonstrate large tunability extending from 700 nm to 1500 nm of femtosecond pulses with pulse energies as high as 1.2 mu J when the OPA is seeded by a supercontinuum generated in a photonic crystal fiber. Broadband amplification over more than 85 nm is achieved at a fixed wavelength. Subsequent compression in a prism sequence resulted in 46 fs pulses. With an average power of 0.5 W these pulses have a peak-power above 10 MW. In particular, the average power and pulse energy scalability of both involved concepts, the fiber laser and the parametric amplifier, will enable easy up-scaling to higher powers (c) 2006 Optical Society of America.