Near-transform-limited picosecond pulses from diode laser with an aperiodic Bragg-grating fibre

Summary form only given. Compression of mode laser pulses and broad spectral tuning of the compressed pulses is of current interest due to the expected increase in second harmonic and optical parametric oscillation efficiencies that could be realised due to the decreased pulse durations and narrow spectral bandwidths. With this objective in mind, we used commercial InGaAs/GaAs single-mode ridge waveguide lasers, which had an active stripe width of 3 /spl mu/m and an emission wavelength of 980 nm. The typical gain-switched pulse duration was /spl sim/32 ps at a user-defined pulse repetition frequency, in the range 180-270 GHz and average powers up to 100 mW.