Generation of 63-fs 4-MW pulses from a fiber parabolic amplifier

Since the discovery of self-similar pulse propagation in optical fibers, a lot of research efforts were directed towards the generation of high peak power ultrashort pulses using the parabolic amplifying regime. Here, we report the generation of 63 fs FWHM pulsewidth, 4-MW peak power pulses, at 1050 nm wavelength, corresponding to an energy of 0.28 muJ. These results are obtained with a single parabolic amplifier recompressed using a grating pair. This represents, to our knowledge, the best performance both in terms of pulsewidth and energy in the 1 mum wavelength region for such amplifiers.