Ultrafast Fiber Lasers: An Expanding Versatile Toolbox

Ultrafast fiber lasers have gained rapid advances in last decades for their intrinsic merits such as potential of all-fiber format, excellent beam quality, superior power scalability, and high single-pass gain, which opened widespread applications in high-field science, laser machining, precision metrology, optical communication, microscopy and spectroscopy, and modern ophthalmology, to name a few. Performance of an ultrafast fiber laser is well defined by the laser parameters including repetition rate, spectral bandwidth, pulse duration, pulse energy, wavelength tuning range, and average power. During past years, these parameters have been pushed to an unprecedented level. In this paper, we review these enabling technologies and explicitly show that the nonlinear interaction between ultrafast pulses and optical fibers plays the essential role. As a result of rapid development in both active and passive fibers, the toolbox of ultrafast fiber lasers will continue to expand and provide solutions to scientific and industrial problems.