Mid-IR Hybrid Fiber/Crystal Laser Delivering Near Fourier Transform Limited Picosecond Optical Pulses with Fast Wavelength Tuning

Emission of ultra-short pulses generally relies on mode-lock lasers. For femtosecond pulses, a large amount of longitudinal modes needs to be phase-locked resulting in a broad emission spectrum generally around 10 nm while picosecond pulses can be obtained with a moderate emission linewidth smaller than 1 nm. Picosecond pulses are thus preferred for applications like nonlinear wavelength conversion which generally accept limited bandwidth but need high peak powers for conversion efficiency.