Optimized one-step compression of femtosecond fibre laser pulses to 30 fs in dispersion-flattened highly nonlinear fibre

In this paper, however, we show that it is possible to obtain high quality nonlinear compressed pulses using only one segment of readily-available highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF). By directly splicing a very short (7 cm) length of HNLF to the output single mode fiber pigtail of a commercial femtosecond fiber laser, frequency resolved optical gating (FROG) confirms that nonlinear compression results in the generation of 28 fs pulses. This represents an extremely simple modification allowing an essentially loss-free factor-of-three reduction in pulse duration relative to the primary source.