Embedded optical sensors always require more compact, stable, and powerful laser sources. In this Letter, we present a fully integrated passively Q-switched laser, which has been realized by a Ag(+)/Na(+) ion exchange on a Nd(3+)-doped phosphate glass. A BDN-doped cellulose acetate thick film is deposited on the waveguide, acting as an upper cladding and providing a distributed saturable absorption. At λ=1054 nm, the device emits pulses of 1.3 ns FWHM with a repetition rate of 28 kHz. These performances, coupled with the 1 kW peak power, are promising for applications such as supercontinuum generation.

Mode-lock lasers have been studied a lot in the past years for producing pulses as short as possible. These devices have mostly been realized in bulk optics and they are consequently cumbersome and sensitive to vibrations. There are only a few studies on integrated optics mode-lock lasers, though this technology is very promising because of its stability, compactness and the possibility to integrate several functions on a single chip. In this paper, we present an ion-exchange passively mode-locked laser in dissipative soliton operation. One of the key characteristics of this structure is its mechanical stability. Indeed, no bulk optics is needed because the saturable absorber is hybridized on the top of the waveguide in order to interact with the evanescent part of the guided mode. Indeed, the device that has been obtained is composed of an ion-exchanged single mode waveguide realized in a Neodymium doped phosphate glass. The laser feedback is produced by a Fabry-Perot cavity realized with two multilayers dielectric mirrors stuck on the waveguides facets. We implemented a bis(4-dimethylaminodithiobenzil)nickel (BDN) dye included in a cellulose acetate thick film, which presents a saturable absorber behaviour around 1.06 µm. With this structure, pulses with repetition rates of 3.3 GHz and a single mode output have been measured. Moreover, the use of an autocorrelation set-up allowed us measuring picosecond pulse durations.

L’optique adaptative (OA) est aujourd’hui une technologie bien connue des designers de systèmes optiques. C’est peutêtre parce qu’à première vue, elle paraît magique. Une image floue entre dans le système d’OA et en ressort nette !

Adaptive optics (AO) is a technology that optical designers are looking to more and more. AO can look like a magical solution: A completely blurred image can be restored to diffraction limited quality. In the beginning, this technology was developed for astronomical telescopes. It was soon transferred to vision science, and it is quickly becoming an essential technique in optical microscopy to compensate for specimen-induced optical aberrations to acquire high resolution images.