Prospects of ultrafast fiber lasers

Ultrafast fiber lasers offer an attractive alternative to bulk solid-state lasers due to their efficiency, compactness, and
alignment-free design. However, the output pulse energy is typically limited by the nonlinear phase accumulation in
the long waveguide, which causes some spectral/temporal pulse shape distortions. Thus the existing market for
ultrafast lasers dominated by solid-state lasers, primarily Ti:sapphire. In the last few years, a new type of
environmentally stable fiber sources, based on the Mamyshev regenerator, have been demonstrated. These ultrafast
fiber sources can provide capabilities comparable or better to solid state counterparts within compact, versatile, lowcost devices. In this talk, I will discuss the new trends in ultrafast fiber lasers that embrace nonlinearity instead of
avoiding it. I will focus primarily on two promising directions: modelocked oscillators that can generate multimegawatt pulses and systems that use nonlinear pulse propagation to achieve ultrashort pulses without a modelocked
oscillator.