Divided Pulse Lasers

We show that divided-pulse amplification can be used within a laser cavity to increase the pulse energy of a soliton fiber laser. In divided-pulse amplification, pulses are split up N times prior to amplification. After amplification, they are recombined into a single pulse. By reducing the peak intensity within the gain fiber, each split copy can be amplified to the single-pulse limit, and therefore the final recombined pulse can have N times higher energy. This work was featured in Spotlight on Optics.