We introduce a new low-loss fast intracavity semiconductor Fabry-Perot saturable absorber operated at anti-resonance both to start and sustain stable mode locking of a cw-pumped Nd:YLF laser. We achieved a 3.3-ps pulse duration at a 220-MHz repetition rate. The average output power was 700 mW with 2 W of cw pump power from a Ti:sapphire laser. At pump powers of less than 1.6 W the laser self-Q switches and produces 4-ps pulses within a 1.4-micros Q-switched pulse at an approximately 150-kHz repetition rate determined by the relaxation oscillation of the Nd:YLF laser. Both modes of operation are stable. In terms of coupled-cavity mode locking, the intra-cavity antiresonant Fabry-Perot saturable absorber corresponds to monolithic resonant passive mode locking.

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We report time-to-space mapping of femtosecond light pulses in a temporal holography setup. By reading out a temporal hologram of a short optical pulse with a continuous-wave diode laser, we accurately convert temporal pulse-shape information into a spatial pattern that can be viewed with a camera. We demonstrate real-time acquisition of electric-field autocorrelation and cross correlation of femtosecond pulses with this technique.

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We produced transform-limited pulses as short as 130 fs with 160-mW average output power from a passively mode-locked Nd:glass laser. This is to our knowledge the first demonstration of an intracavity semiconductor antiresonant Fabry-Perot saturable absorber continuously starting a Kerr-induced passively mode-locked laser. The antiresonant Fabry-Perot saturable absorber, even with dispersion compensation, produced only picosecond pulses, and femtosecond performance was observed only with the addition of an intracavity long-pass wavelength filter. We propose a new mode-locking mechanism, which we refer to as Kerr-shift mode locking, in which the wavelength-dependent intracavity aperture and self-phase modulation in Nd:glass combine to produce a self-wavelength shift that reduces intracavity losses for femtosecond pulses.