Advanced Undergraduate Laboratory

Department of Physics

University of Toronto

UFF: Ultrafast Fibre-Laser

Ultrafast sub-picosecond lasers are used to study physical and chemical dynamics at the smallest timescales, in a wide variety of new spectroscopic methods, and also have applications in bio-imaging, medicine, and micromachining.

This under development experiment is designed to introduce the physics of ultrafast optics: how ultrafast lasers make ultrafast optical pulses, studies of linear propagation and nonlinear optics of ultrafast optical pulses, and several advanced topics of experiments about or using femtosecond laser pulses.

This experiment was rebuilt as a Engineering Science Physics Option Capstone Design Project in Fall 2017, so the material below is largely outdated, but new material will be available from the supervising professor.

Write-Up in PDF Format or Microsoft Word Format.

(The experiment is currently located in MP246; last write-up revision: May 2005.)

Some additional resources:

• Fibre, coupling and sensor card data supplied by manufacturers: JDS-Uniphase datasheets.pdf
• Photodiode data supplied by manufacturer: Integrated Photodiode.pdf

• A Labview program written by Greg Vowles to communicate with the ANDO AQ-6310C Optical Spectrum Analyzer: Ando_Data_Collection.vi. Library file: ANDO_AQ-6310C_UT_sub-vis.llb.
• Labview Autocorrelation simulation executable program: Autocorrelator12.exe.
• Another Labview program: Polarization States Vb.vi

• Matlab program which imports the interferometric autocorrelation data and processed it to obtain the Full-Width-Half-Maximum (FHM) of the Intensity Autocorrelation: ACfilter.m. Example Excel file for import: mes1.xls
• Matlab program which imports the Optical Spectrum Analyzer signal and determines the pulse width in the frequency domain: OSA.m. Example Excel file for import: ml1a.xls
• Matlab program which imports the oscilloscope data for the Autocorrelator Trigger, Speaker Signal, and Measured Interferometric Autocorrelation: SCOPE.m. Example Excel files for import: ref1.xls , ref2.xls

This experiment is part of the Photonics/Optics Teaching Laboratory at the Department of Physics, University of Toronto.

3^rd year undergraduates, Matthew Strimas-Mackey and Aharon Kagedan, working on the Ultrafast Fibre Laser, 13 October 2004.

Last updated on 30 December 2017