Building a 1W, 1064 nm mode locked fibre laser

We demonstrate the construction of a fiber based mode locked laser that is driven in synchronization with a femtosecond master laser through an RF circuit. The laser is characterized based on the pulse widths and pulse powers around the locking frequency. The cavity length of the laser was then optimized to have a match between the locking frequency and the master lasers repetition rate. Two stages of amplifiers are used to obtain the required peak powers in the pulses. Thus we have a mode locked laser that has 1 W peak pulse power for picosecond pulses at 1064 nm wavelength. © 2012 IEEE.