High-energy femtosecond pulse compression in chirped fiber gratings

Summary form only given. Recent advances in fabrication of chirped fiber gratings made possible the development of compact and robust femtosecond chirped pulse amplification (CPA) systems, based on all-fiber design. The group-velocity dispersion of chirped wide-bandwidth fiber gratings is /spl sim/10/sup 5/ times larger than that of standard fibers and allows to reach large stretching/compression ratios within a short length (1-10 cm) of a fiber. Due to the reduced propagation distance, nonlinear distortions of compressed pulses are expected at significantly high energies. The objective of this paper is to investigate, both experimentally and theoretically, these pulse energy and duration limits for fiber-grating compressors and to determine conditions for their optimized performance in conjunction with an all-fiber CPA circuit.