Laser light has enabled some of the most important scientific discoveries and innovations, and research in newer types of lasers continues to reveal more applications. Mid-infrared light, which interacts strongly with naturally occurring molecules, holds many promises in sensing and medical technologies and their applications are now beginning to appear. This surging development will strongly benefit with the availability of field-usable, compact and robust sources of mid-infrared light. The fibre lasers have the extreme potential to achieve this; however their performance in terms of generating ultrafast pulses of mid-infrared light has not yet been demonstrated. Here we explore the potential fluoride fibre lasers have in the ultrafast pulsed regime. We have demonstrated this via the production of nanosecond, to picosecond, and finally femtosecond pulses from fluoride fibre lasers using a variety of methods. These demonstrations reveal that fluoride fibres lasers are strong candidates to be an ultrafast mid-infrared source, with applications ranging from frequency comb based molecular sensing to next generation laser scalpels
