Pulse extraction and kW peak power generation with the nonlinear optical loop mirror in an erbium-doped fiber amplifier chain

The nonlinear optical loop mirror is used to suppress optical noise and residual coherent background between repetitive short optical pulses. An input pulse power fraction of only 0.6% is improved to 80% at the output of the device. The device is passive and, in principle, independent of wavelength, pulse width, pulse repetition rate, and input signal polarization. This technique can be used to generate high peak power pulses using a cascade of optical amplifiers. Here we report the generation of 140 ps square pulses with 2 kW peak power (0.3 /spl mu/J) at a repetition rate of 10 kHz.