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Photonic devices that can guide, transfer, or modulate light are highly desired in electronics and integrated silicon (Si) photonics. Here, we demonstrate for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the creation of optical waveguides deep inside Si using femtosecond pulses at a central wavelength of 1.5 μm. To this end, we use 350 fs long, 2 μJ pulses with a repetition rate of 250 kHz from an Er-doped fiber laser, which we focused inside Si to create permanent modifications of the crystal. The position of the beam is accurately controlled with pump-probe imaging during fabrication. Waveguides that were 5.5 mm in length and 20 μm in diameter were created by scanning the focal position along the beam propagation axis. The fabricated waveguides were characterized with a continuous-wave laser operating at 1.5 μm. The refractive index change inside the waveguide was measured with optical shadowgraphy, yielding a value of 6×10 -4 , and by direct light coupling and far-field imaging, yielding a value of 3.5×10 -4 . The formation mechanism of the modification is discussed.

We report on the generation of 42 fs pulses at 1 μm in a completely fiber-integrated format, which are, to the best of our knowledge, the shortest from all-fiber-integrated Yb-doped fiber lasers to date. The ring fiber cavity incorporates anomalous-dispersion, solid-core photonic crystal fiber with low birefringence, which acts as a broadband, in-fiber Lyot filter to facilitate mode locking. The oscillator operates in the stretched-pulse regime under slight normal net cavity dispersion. The cavity generates 4.7 ps long pulses with a spectral bandwidth of 58.2 nm, which are dechirped to 42 fs via a grating pair compressor outside of the cavity. Relative intensity noise (RIN) of the laser is characterized, with the integrated RIN found to be 0.026% in the 3 Hz-250 kHz frequency range.

We demonstrate an all-fiber-integrated Er-doped fiber laser operating in the soliton-similariton mode-locking regime. In the similariton part of the cavity, a self-similarly evolving parabolic pulse with highly linear chirp propagates in the presence of normal dispersion. Following an in-line fiber-based birefringent filter, the pulse evolves into a soliton in the part of the cavity with anomalous dispersion. The similariton and the soliton pulses are dechirped to 75.5 and 167.2 fs, respectively, outside of the cavity. Mode-locked operation is very robust, owing to the influence of the two similariton and soliton attractors that predominate each half of the laser cavity. The experimental results are supported with numerical simulations, which provide good agreement.

We demonstrate burst-mode operation of a polarization-maintaining Yb-doped fiber amplifier capable of generating 60 μJ pulses within bursts of 11 pulses with extremely uniform energy distribution facilitated by a novel feedback mechanism shaping the seed of the burst-mode amplifier. The burst energy can be scaled up to 1 mJ, comprising 25 pulses with 40 μJ average individual energy. The amplifier is synchronously pulse pumped to minimize amplified spontaneous emission between the bursts. Pulse propagation is entirely in fiber and fiber-integrated components until the grating compressor, which allows for highly robust operation. The burst repetition rate is set to 1 kHz and spacing between individual pulses is 10 ns. The 40 μJ pulses are externally compressible to a full width at half-maximum of 600 fs. However, due to the substantial pedestal of the compressed pulses, the effective pulse duration is longer, estimated to be 1.2 ps.

We demonstrate burst-mode operation of a polarization-maintaining Yb-doped fiber amplifier. Groups of pulses with a temporal spacing of 10 ns and 1 kHz overall repetition rate are amplified to an average pulse energy of ∼20 μJ and total burst energy of 0.25 mJ. The pulses are externally compressed to ∼400 fs. The amplifier is synchronously pulsed-pumped to minimize amplified spontaneous emission between the bursts. We characterize the influence of pump pulse duration, pump-to-signal delay, and signal burst length.