Fabrication, characterization, and laser performance of an Yb:Lu 2 O 3 planar waveguide laser are reported. Pulsed laser deposition was employed to grow an 8 µm-thick Yb-doped lutetia waveguide on a YAG substrate. X-ray diffraction was used to determine the crystallinity, and spectroscopic characterization showed the absorption and emission cross-sections were indistinguishable from those reported for bulk material. When end-pumped by a diode-laser bar an output power of 7.4 W was achieved, limited by the available pump power, at a wavelength of 1033 nm and a slope efficiency of 38% with respect to the absorbed pump power.

We present a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror mode-locked thin disk laser based on Yb:Lu(2)O(3) with an average power of 141 W and an optical-to-optical efficiency of more than 40%. The ideal soliton pulses have an FWHM duration of 738 fs, an energy of 2.4 microJ, and a corresponding peak power of 2.8 MW. The repetition rate was 60 MHz and the beam was close to the diffraction limit with a measured M(2) below 1.2.

Ultrafast thin disk laser oscillators achieve the highest average output powers and pulse energies of any mode-locked laser oscillator technology. The thin disk concept avoids thermal problems occurring in conventional high-power rod or slab lasers and enables high-power TEM 00 operation with broadband gain materials. Stable and self-starting passive pulse formation is achieved with semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs). The key components of ultrafast thin disk lasers, such as gain material, SESAM, and dispersive cavity mirrors, are all used in reflection. This is an advantage for the generation of ultrashort pulses with excellent temporal, spectral, and spatial properties because the pulses are not affected by large nonlinearities in the oscillator. Output powers close to 100 W and pulse energies above 10 µJ are directly obtained without any additional amplification, which makes these lasers interesting for a growing number of industrial and scientific applications such as material processing or driving experiments in high-field science. Ultrafast thin disk lasers are based on a power-scalable concept, and substantially higher power levels appear feasible. However, both the highest power levels and pulse energies are currently only achieved with Yb:YAG as the gain material, which limits the gain bandwidth and therefore the achievable pulse duration to 700 to 800 fs in It is important to evaluate their suitability for power scaling in the thin disk laser geometry. In this paper, we review the development of ultrafast thin disk lasers with shorter pulse durations. We discuss the requirements on the gain materials and compare different Yb-doped host materials. The recently developed sesquioxide materials are particularly promising as they enabled the highest optical-tooptical efficiency (43%) and shortest pulse duration (227 fs) ever achieved with a mode-locked thin disk laser.

The rise of semiconductor-based pump sources such as In x Ga 1-x N-laser diodes or frequency-doubled optically pumped semiconductor lasers with emission wavelengths in the blue encourages a revisitation of the rare-earth ions Pr 3+ , Sm 3+ , Tb 3+ , Dy 3+ , Ho 3+ and Er 3+ with respect to their properties as active ions in crystalline solid-state laser materials with direct emission in the visible spectral range. Nowadays, some of these blue-pumped visible lasers compete with Nd 3+ -lasers in terms of efficiency and direct lasing at various colors from the cyan-blue to the deep red can be addressed in very simple and compact laser setups. This paper highlights the spectroscopic properties of suitable rare-earth ions for visible lasing and reviews the latest progress in the field of blue-pumped visible rare-earth doped solid-state lasers.