Compression of 980-nm diode laser pulses using an aperiodic Bragg grating fiber

Summary form only given. Compression of diode laser pulses and broad spectral tuning of the compressed pulses is of current interest due to the expected increase in second-harmonic efficiency that could be realized due to the decreased pulse durations and narrow spectral bandwidths. With this objective in mind, we used commercial InGaAs-GaAs single-mode ridge waveguide lasers, which had an active stripe width of 3 /spl mu/m, a cavity length of 750 /spl mu/m, and an emission wavelength of 980 nm. The typical gain-switched pulse duration was 35 ps at a user-defined pulse repetition frequency, in the range 1.80-2.70 GHz and average powers up to 100 mW.