6/4/2019 – Congrats to Dr. Walter Fu on completing his B Exam! Best to luck to him and all his future endeavors. Check out Walter, Zimu and Frank at the May commencement ceremony:
Gallery Archives
Normal-dispersion fiber optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification
Normal-dispersion fiber optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification
An ongoing limitation of fiber lasers is their lack of broad wavelength tunability. Here, we address this problem using fiber optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (FOPCPA), which combines the energy capacity of chirped pulse amplification with the spectral flexibility of optical parametric amplification and the practical benefits of fiber. Notably, this is the first FOPCPA to be pumped in the normally-dispersive regime, which permits phase-matching far from the pump wavelength.
The system operates by coupling a stretched, broadband pump pulse and a continuous-wave signal into a photonic crystal fiber. At each point in time, the monochromatic signal interacts via four-wave-mixing with a different wavelength of the chirped pump, resulting in an idler that is chirped in exactly the same manner as the pump. Scalability follows from the timescale-invariance of this process: stretching the pump at constant peak power likewise stretches the idler at constant peak power, increasing the energy without affecting the dechirped duration. By exploiting this property, we are able to convert pulses from the Yb-band to the important bio-imaging window near 1300 nm, with energies of >100 nJ and femtosecond-scale durations.
9/11/2018 – Walter travels to the far-away country of Canada to visit colleagues and friends at Université Laval! Pictured below in the company of Réal Vallée and Simon Duval.
7/29/2018 – Frank returns from speaking at the celebration of 15 years of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. Wise group making waves!
Self-seeded, multi-megawatt, Mamyshev oscillator
Self-seeded, multi-megawatt, Mamyshev oscillator
As was shown by Liu et al., the pulses from a Mamyshev oscillator can be enhanced by increasing the spectral separation between the two bandpass filters. However, this comes at a cost: the same mechanism that strongly stabilizes the pulse against continuous-wave breakthrough also suppresses the weak electric field fluctuations that are needed to initiate pulse formation. Thus, a Mamyshev oscillator may be constructed that supports very high-energy pulses, but which can be mode-locked only with the aid of an external seed source. In this paper, we address this problem by showing how a simple auxiliary cavity–a “starting arm”–may be embedded into a Mamyshev oscillator, enabling the oscillator to seed itself at the flip of a mirror. A video of this process can be viewed here. We have furthermore scaled part of the cavity to fiber with a 10-micron core diameter. The result is a fiber oscillator with self-starting-like behavior that can deliver 190-nJ, 35-fs pulses without any external amplification, for an unprecedented peak power of 3 MW after dechirping.
7/1/2018 – Zimu Zhu returns from attending Nonlinear Photonics in Zurich with fond memories, new ideas, and the Best Student Paper Prize. Congratulations!
5/26/2018 – Congratulations to the Wise group’s latest graduate – Dr. Logan Wright! It’s clear that his parents couldn’t be prouder, and neither could we!
4/20/2018 – Congratulations to Logan Wright, who will be receiving the Tingye Li Innovation Prize at CLEO 2018 next month, to Zimu Zhu for receiving the Incubic/Milton Chang Travel Grant! Big news, and major recognition of their work!
Spatiotemporal mode-locking in multimode fiber lasers
Spatiotemporal mode-locking in multimode fiber lasers
Unlike a conventional single-mode, ‘one-dimensional’ laser, the frequencies of a multimode, multidimensional laser are ordinarily very complicated (figure below, top left, where different colors correspond to different spatial modes). However, we showed that, for a properly designed laser (bottom), the laser’s frequencies would adjust automatically into an organized, synchronized pattern (figure top right), corresponding to the emission of a 3D, multimode laser pulse at regular intervals. Pulses from this laser might eventually allow very sophisticated light-matter interactions, especially with complex molecules (different modes of the laser may interact with different ‘modes’, specific transitions, of molecules or other matter). We have some moderately crazy ideas to realize PW or even EW (exawatt) lasers with this approach.
10/6/2017 – New paper published in Science on spatiotemporal mode-locking. This work was also featured in the Cornell Chronicle.