Monolithic programmable pulse shaper for efficient energy scaling of ultrashort fiber laser pulses in the C-band

Under collaboration with College of Optical Sciences of University of Arizona, NP Photonics proposes to develop a new monolithic programmable pulse shaper with an adaptive control loop by leveraging our mature technology of sol-gel/EO Polymer process for waveguide passive devices at 1.5 micron (AWG, modulator, splitter/coupler), mode-locked fiber lasers, proprietary specialty fibers (large core and high unit gain), short cascade fiber amplifiers, and feedback loop control and algorithms. The proposed new pulse shaper features compact, stable, wide transmission window and high spectral resolution, which can efficiently and accurately pre-compensate the large amount of nonlinear phase (or B-integral) in the chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) system, resulting an all fiber-based, compact, environmentally stable USP source at eye-safe wavelength of 1.5 micron with high pulse energy of 1-10 mJ for applications of interest to the US Navy, such as directed energy weapons, ECM, and LADAR. Based on the demonstration of the feasibility for the proposed pulse shaper in Phase I period, we will implement a single-chip integrated phase shaper in Phase II.