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We report on 260 fs transform-limited pulses generated directly by an optical Stark passively mode-locked semiconductor disk laser at a 1 GHz repetition rate. A surface recombination semiconductor saturable absorber mirror and a step-index gain structure are used. Numerical propagation modeling of the optical Stark effect confirms that this mechanism is able to form the pulses that we observe.

We report what we believe to be the first demonstration of an all-semiconductor room-temperature terahertz time domain spectrometer. An optical Stark mode-locked vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting laser with 480 fs pulses at 1044 nm was used to illuminate low-temperature-grown photoconductive antennae with 5 mum-gap bow-tie-shaped electrodes. The coherently detected spectrum has a bandwidth close to 1 THz, in which water absorption lines at 0.555 and 0.751 THz can be resolved.

We present a method to experimentally characterize the gain filter and calculate a corresponding parabolic gain bandwidth of lasers that are described by "class A" dynamics by solving the master equation of spectral condensation for Gaussian spectra. We experimentally determine the gain filter, with an equivalent parabolic gain bandwidth of up to 51 nm, for broad-band InGaAs/GaAs quantum well gain surface-emitting semiconductor laser structures capable of producing pulses down to 60 fs width when mode-locked with an optical Stark saturable absorber mirror.

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