Amplification and compression of temporally shaped picosecond pulses in Yb-doped rod-type fibers.

We report on a new technique to produce high power sub-picosecond pulses from a fiber amplifier. We use parabolic pulse shaping of 27 ps transform-limited pulses in order to control nonlinear effects in the fiber amplifier. 63 MW, 780 fs pulses with 25 W average power were obtained, and ways to scale the technique to higher peak powers were identified.