Amplification and compression of temporally shaped picosecond pulses in Yb-doped rod-type fibers.

We report on a new technique to produce high power sub-picosecond pulses from a fiber amplifier. We use parabolic pulse shaping of 27ps transform-limited pulses in order to control nonlinear effects in the fiber amplifier. 63MW, 780fs pulses with 25W average power were obtained, and ways to scale the technique to higher peak powers were identified. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America