Generation of High Power Ultrashort Pulses in Tapered Yb-Doped PCF Through Self-Similar Compression

We present a numerical approach for analysing simultaneous amplification and compression of a chirped hyperbolic secant soliton using a tapered Yb-doped photonic crystal fiber (PCF) based self-similar compressor. Theoretical studies reveal the conservation of input soliton during the amplification process due to self-similar property, which in turn helps for high quality compression of amplified soliton. In order to satisfy the self-similar condition, we note that the Yb-doped fiber should exhibit a decreasing group velocity dispersion (GVD). Such a constraint is met using a tapered PCF in our work, which is modeled using a fully vectorial effective index method (FVEIM). Influence of spatial and spectral dependent gain, saturation energy, amplified spontaneous emission (ASE), dispersion and nonlinearity on pulse propagation are analyzed using the combined solution of dynamic rate equations (DRE) and the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation (GNLSE). Numerical outcomes upon solving the aforementioned equations show that a 1 ps pulse is compressed down to a pulsewidth of 55.4 fs with a peak power of 1.03 kW in a total fiber length of
$L=2.5$
m and taper ratio of 2.34. Overall quality of the compression scheme is evidenced by a relatively high compression factor (F
_c
) = 18.12, and low percentage of pedestal energy (
$PE$
) = 10.95 %