We report on controllable pulse shaping in a Yb-doped stretched-pulse fiber laser followed by a high-power chirped pulse amplifier. We demonstrate that the pulses after an extra-cavity grating pair change their intensity profile from Lorentz to Gaussian and then to sech2 shapes by adjusting the intra-cavity polarization through a quarter-wave plate inside the fiber laser cavity. The laser pulses with different pulse shapes exhibit pulse-to-pulse amplitude fluctuation of ～ 1.02%, while the sech2-shaped pulse train is provided with a more stable free-running repetition rate as a result of the stronger self-phase modulation in the fiber laser cavity than Lorentz- and Gaussian-shaped pulse trains.
The molecular wake-assisted interaction between two collinear femotosecond laser pulses is investigated in air,which leads to the generation of a controllable 1.8 mJ super-continuum pulse with an elongated self-guided channel due to the cross-phase modulation of the impulsively aligned diatomic molecules in air. For two parallel launched femtosecond laser pulses with a certain spatial separation,controllable attraction and repulsion of the pulses are observed due to the counter-balance among molecular wakes,Kerr and plasma effects,where the molecular wakes show a longer interaction distance than the others to control the propagation of the intense ultrashort laser pulses.
CAI Hua,WU Jian,LU PeiFen,TONG YuQi,YANG Xuan,BAI XueShi,LI Hao,PAN HaiFeng & ZENG HePing State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy,East China Normal University,Shanghai 200062,China
