Experimental investigations on the generation and amplification of high power short pulses by a quantum dot laser and amplifier

In this paper, we study experimentally the generation of picosecond short optical pulses with an improved peak power of 42 W at a repetition rate of 16 GHz and an associated pulse width of 1.4 ps. Pulses from a tapered quantum dot laser emitting at 1250 nm are amplified using a tapered quantum dot optical amplifier without any pulse post-compression. We specifically investigate the amplification behavior of this master-oscillator power-amplifier configuration with a focus on the pulse peak power, pulse width, average power and amplified spontaneous emission towards improving the figure of merit for two photon excitation microscopy.