Photonic-crystal fibers for dispersion compensation in short-pulse fiber laser sources: design algorithms and dispersion characterization

This work aims at developing a PCF-based stretcher for a sub-mJ fiber chirped pulse amplifier (FCPA) capable of correcting the higher-order dispersion of the amplifier chain and the pulse compressor. We develop a conveniently formalized algorithm for the design of PCFs and prove theoretically the possibility to engineer negative dispersion PCFs of a chosen sign of cubic and quartic phase. Further, we characterize several of-the-shelf negative dispersion PCFs drawn at Uni. Bath by means of spectral interferometry (SI) that makes use of a) a short femtosecond and b) a stretched nanosecond pulses to verify the influence of the nonlinear phase distortion in a prototype PCF pulse stretcher.