Abstract:  The femtosecond lasers that underlie ultrafast science and technology are based on solitons — pulses that balance anomalous dispersion and nonlinearity.  The soliton energy is limited by the nonlinearity, and this limitation is particularly challenging in fiber lasers.  As a consequence, short-pulse fiber lasers have not been competitive with solid-state lasers. Recently, a new class of pulses that form with normal dispersion has been identified.  These are referred to as dissipative solitons, and short-pulse fiber lasers based on them generate pulses with 10 to 100 times the energy of prior fiber lasers.  Dissipative-soliton lasers thus compete directly with, and can even exceed, the performance of solid-state lasers, and so will have major impact on ultrafast science in the future.  After a tutorial introduction to pulse-shaping in femtosecond lasers, theoretical and experimental results on dissipative-soliton lasers will be presented.  Dissipative processes can also be used to stabilize self-similar evolution of parabolic pulses in a laser, which allows further extension of the performance of the lasers.  Lasers based on self-similar evolution will be described briefly.

Bio sketch:  Frank Wise received a BS in Engineering Physics from Princeton University, an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in Applied Physics from Cornell University.  Before PhD studies at Cornell, he worked on advanced integrated circuits at Bell Laboratories from 1982 to 1984.  Since receiving the PhD in 1989, he has been on the faculty in Applied Physics at Cornell.