High average power picosecond pulse and supercontinuum generation from a thulium-doped, all-fiber amplifier

We demonstrate a high-power, picosecond, thulium-doped, all-fiber master oscillator power amplifier with average power of 120.4 W. The compact fiber oscillator is carefully designed with high repetition rate for the purpose of overcoming the detrimental effects of fiber nonlinearity in the later fiber amplifiers. The pulse duration of 16 ps at 333.75 MHz repetition rate results in a peak power of 22.5 kW in the final fiber power amplifier. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of average power exceeding 100 W from an ultrashort pulse laser at 2 μm wavelength. On the other hand, by decreasing the fiber oscillator repetition rate and pulse duration for enhancing the fiber nonlinearity effects, we also demonstrate a high-power supercontinuum source with average power of 36 W from 1.95 μm to beyond 2.4 μm in the final fiber power amplifier.