Sub-50 fs 3.5 nJ pulses at 792 nm generated by frequency doubling of an all-PM fiber laser for Ti:sapphire injection

Frequency doubled sub 50 fs Erbium-fiber lasers are ideal tool used to seed Ti:sapphire amplifier. Therefore, over last decade large number of all-fiber laser architecture has been reported for such application. Nevertheless, the emitted pulses are usually too long due to the gain bandwidth of Erbium or the laser architecture is not made with Polarization Maintaining (PM) fibers which will be a limitation for frequency doubling. We demonstrate a new design of an all-PM erbium doped fiber laser emitting sub 50 fs pulses with high pulse energy and we study its frequency doubling. Our architecture is based on a concatenation of three amplifiers having different group velocity dispersion. These amplifiers provide numerous degrees of freedom allowing to control the output pulse duration. Thanks to this new design, the laser produces 14 nJ pulse with a duration of 48 fs and an average power of 560 mW. This is to the best of our knowledge the shortest pulse duration with an energy higher than 10 nJ emitted by an all-fiber laser around 1.5-1.6 μm. The pulses are further converted by Second Harmonic Generation to 796 nm with an efficiency of 25 %. The average power of the doubled signal is 140 mW with 3.5 nJ pulse energy. The nonlinear crystal has been carefully chosen in order to cover all the spectral bandwidth of the pump and to ensure a sub 50 fs pulse at 796 nm.