Picosecond Laser Pulses

Development of an Ultrafast Low-Energy Electron Diffraction Setup

“…The field of ultrafast science is intimately connected to the development of mode-locked laser sources in the 1960s [117], which ultimately allowed for the observation of extremely short-lived phenomena [118,119] on time scales below those accessible via electronic means [47,120].…”

Towards a Compact Thin-Disk-Based Femtosecond XUV Source

“…This technique is an example of active mode-locking. Later it was found that a saturable absorber placed inside a cavity can also serve as a shutter [5], discriminating against CW and favouring pulsed operation. In that case there is no active modulator and intensity fluctuation modulates itself via a saturable absorber.…”

“…Another situation in Fig.1.2(b) corresponds to the combination of a gain medium, the dynamics of which can be neglected on a short time scale, with a fast saturable absorber responsible for the formation of the time-window with net gain. A solid-state gain medium mode-locked with a dye saturable absorber or via KLM can be described in this way [5] for example. Mode-locking can also be realized without a fast shutter and only with the help of intrinsically stable soliton pulses ( Fig.1.2(c)).…”

“…This evolution took an intricate way: from the gas laser to the solid-state laser [5], then to the liquid dye laser [6] and more recently to the allsolid-state diode-pumped Ti:sapphire oscillator [7,8]. The latter technology being robust, compact and durable breathed new life into already exciting applications and opened up fundamentally new directions in photon science.…”