Picosecond pulses from an FDML laser

The recently developed Fourier Domain Mode Locked lasers (FDML) are very rapidly wavelength swept light sources, where a narrowband optical bandpass filter is driven resonantly to the round-trip time of light in the resonator, providing small instantaneous linewidths (~50pm) over a large wavelength sweep range (~100nm) at sweep repetition rates of ~20kHz-5MHz.