Patent ID: 7420994

Claim:
A pulsed cascaded Raman laser comprising: a pulsed light source generating a pulsed light having an optical spectrum centered at a source wavelength; and a non-linear Raman conversion fiber coupled to the pulsed light source, said Raman conversion fiber of said pulsed cascaded Raman laser having (i) dispersion D, and −10 ps/nm/km<D<−100 ps/nm/km, and (ii) fiber length sufficient to overcome N-th Stokes threshold, but not sufficient to overcome (N+1) Stokes threshold resulting in source power converted mostly into N-th order; wherein the pulsed light traverses the nonlinear Raman conversion fiber of said pulsed cascaded Raman laser and the source power at the source wavelength is converted to an output power of said pulsed cascaded Raman laser, said output power being centered at an output wavelength longer than the source wavelength by a cascaded Stimulated Raman Scattering process, such that most of the source power is converted to the power output of the last Stokes order in a single pass through the non-linear Raman conversion fiber.