Chirped pulse amplification with a nonlinearly chirped fiber Bragg grating matched to the Treacy compressor

We demonstrate a fiber chirped pulse amplification system that uses an engineered nonlinearly chirped fiber Bragg grating stretcher dispersion matched to the Treacy compressor. The seed pulses at 1558 nm are stretched to 720 ps, amplified by more than 50 dB to 6.5-muJ energy, and recompressed to 940 fs. After almost 1000 times compression the pulses are within 30% of the bandwidth limit and have a contrast ratio of better than 30 dB. (C) 2004 Optical Society of America.