光纤激光器以高光束质量、高效率、高集成、高可靠性等特点给科学研究和技术应用带来了巨大的影响.超短高能量脉冲光纤激光器在通信、传感、精密机械加工、材料处理、超快诊断、生物医学和国防军事等领域均有重要的应用.如何提高激光脉冲的功率和能量,掌握和利用超短脉冲光纤激光的复杂非线性,开展大功率、高能量、超宽带全光纤超短脉冲激光应用的关键技术研究,成为光纤脉冲激光新现象、新方法和实现技术体系突破的重大科学问题.本文简要总结了近年来国内外关于锁模光纤激光器研究的一些关键技术和重要成果,分析了各类激光器及所产生脉冲的优缺点,并介绍了过去几年中我们对如何提高光纤脉冲激光器性能和实现新型脉冲的研究成果.重点讨论了不同色散区内光纤激光器的典型行为特征,从理论与实验两方面揭示了传统孤子和多种耗散孤子的产生机理、输出特性及其演化规律.此外,还介绍了几种新型的高能量无波分裂脉冲.本文的成果可为进一步研究新型高能量脉冲提供有益的理论及实验基础.通过这些介绍和讨论,期望同行能够共同研究和探索基于新型锁模技术超短超强脉冲的新现象和新机理,并且在超短高能量脉冲的极端非线性科学问题上获得新认识.
Fiber lasers have promoted the development of scientific researches and technology applications for their excellent beam quality, high efficiency, compact structure, and high reliability. Ultra-short high-energy pulse fiber lasers can find important applications in the areas of optic communication, sensing, precision machining, material processing, ultra-fast diagnosis, biomedicine, and national defense. Consequently, how to increase the power and energy of the laser pulse, control and utilize the complex nonlinearity, and develop the key technologies for the applications of high-power, high-energy, and ultra-broadband all-fiber ultra-short pulse lasers become the important scientific issues for the exploration of new phenomena and schemes as well as the breakthrough of technical systems about fiber laser pulses. This article briefly reviews some key techniques and important progresses about mode-locked fiber lasers, discusses the merits and drawbacks of various fiber lasers and pulses, also introduces our research results in the past several years about how to improve the performance of fiber lasers and achieve novel kinds of pulses. We particularly discuss the typical behaviors of fiber lasers operating in different dispersion regimes, and demonstrate both experimentally and numerically the formation mechanisms, output features, and dynamic evolutions of conventional solitons as well as dissipative solitons. Moreover, several novel types of high-energy wave-breaking-free pulses are introduced. These results in the article may provide helpful theoretical and experimental fundamentals for the in-depth study of new high-energy pulses. Hopefully, our introductions and discussions can attract the researchers' attentions to the exploration of new phenomena and mechanisms of ultra-short high-energy pulses based on novel mode-lockers, and bring the new understandings about nonlinear phenomenon of ultra-short high-energy pulses under extreme conditions.