Semiconductor saturable-absorber mirror–assisted Kerr-lens mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser producing pulses in the two-cycle regime

Sutter, Dirk; Steinmeyer, Günter; Gallmann, L.; Matuschek, N.; Morier‐Genoud, F.; Keller, U.; Scheuer, V.; Angelow, G.; Tschudi, Τ.

doi:10.1364/ol.24.000631

Cited by 374 publications

(180 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Ti:sapphire gain material has a particularly high optical gain bandwidth supporting less than 6-fs pulse duration from low energy oscillators [47,48], which is shorter than for any other laser materials. Unfortunately, its pump wavelength is in the blue-green spectral region, which requires complex and expensive pump lasers.…”

Section: Gain Materials With Larger Emission Bandwidthmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-power ultrafast thin disk laser oscillators and their potential for sub-100-femtosecond pulse generation

et al. 2009

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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.

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Section: Gain Materials With Larger Emission Bandwidthmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-power ultrafast thin disk laser oscillators and their potential for sub-100-femtosecond pulse generation

et al. 2009

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“…The titanium-doped sapphire crystal [7] as a gain material took over the role of dyes, since broader gain bandwidth, better thermal properties and convenient handling made femtosecond lasers simple and reliable light sources. However, the fundamentally different properties of this material required the invention of a new mode-locking technique [8], identified later as Kerr-lens mode-locking [9], which enabled the Ti:sapphire lasers to achieve the same record of pulse duration [10,11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What We Can Learn about Ultrashort Pulses by Linear Optical Methods

2013

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Spatiotemporal compression of ultrashort pulses is one of the key issues of chirped pulse amplification (CPA), the most common method to achieve high intensity laser beams. Successful shaping of the temporal envelope and recombination of the spectral components of the broadband pulses need careful alignment of the stretcher-compressor stages. Pulse parameters are required to be measured at the target as well. Several diagnostic techniques have been developed so far for the characterization of ultrashort pulses. Some of these methods utilize nonlinear optical processes, while others based on purely linear optics, in most cases, combined with spectrally resolving device. The goal of this work is to provide a review on the capabilities and limitations of the latter category of the ultrafast diagnostical methods. We feel that the importance of these powerful, easy-to-align, high-precision techniques needs to be emphasized, since their use could gradually improve the efficiency of different CPA systems. We give a general description on the background of spectrally resolved linear interferometry and demonstrate various schematic experimental layouts for the detection of material dispersion, angular dispersion and carrier-envelope phase drift. Precision estimations and discussion of potential applications are also provided.

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“…One optical cycle at 800 nm is only 2.7 fs long. The long-standing record of 6-fs pulses [9] in the dye laser era in 1987 was passed for the first time in 1999, more than 10 years later, with a KLM SESAM-assisted Ti:sapphire laser using double-chirped mirrors (DCMs) for broadband dispersion compensation [10]. In contrast to the older world-record result no external pulse amplification and compression was necessary and these pulses were obtained directly at the output of the laser oscillator.…”

Section: Current Frontier In Klm Ti:sapphire Laser Oscillatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because the Kerr lens produces a "nonresonant" saturable absorber, it is inherently broadband, broader than any other saturable absorber available today. Thus compared to the ultrafast dye lasers, for which only pulses as short as 27 fs with around 10 mW average power were generated [81], pulses around 5 to 6 fs with hundreds of milliwatts of average power can be produced with Ti:sapphire lasers [10,13]. In addition, very broad tunability with sub-100-fs pulses became possible for the first time.…”

Section: Kerr-lens Modelocking (Klm)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ultrafast solid-state laser oscillators: a success story for the last 20 years with no end in sight

Keller

2010

Appl. Phys. B

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Ultrashort lasers provide an important tool to probe the dynamics of physical systems at very short timescales, allowing for improved understanding of the performance of many devices and phenomena used in science, technology, and medicine. In addition ultrashort pulses also provide a high peak intensity and a broad optical spectrum, which opens even more applications such as material processing, nonlinear optics, attosecond science, and metrology. There has been a long-standing, ongoing effort in the field to reduce the pulse duration and increase the power of these lasers to continue to empower existing and new applications. After 1990, new techniques such as semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs) and Kerrlens mode locking (KLM) allowed for the generation of stable pulse trains from diode-pumped solid-state lasers for the first time, and enabled the performance of such lasers to improve by several orders of magnitude with regards to pulse duration, pulse energy and pulse repetition rates. This invited review article gives a broad overview and includes some personal accounts of the key events during the last 20 years, which made ultrafast solid-state lasers a success story. Ultrafast Ti:sapphire, diode-pumped solid-state, and novel semiconductor laser oscillators will be reviewed. The perspective for the near future indicates continued significant progress in the field. Current status and introductionAs we look back from today in 2010 for the last 20 years, we see that ultrafast solid-state lasers have become the key U. Keller ( ) Institute of Quantum Electronics, Physics Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: keller@phys.ethz.ch enabling technology for many new applications, and have established themselves successfully in at least several industrial areas. The situation was substantially different 20 years ago, when ultrafast lasers were predominantly based on dye laser technology or active modelocked solid-state lasers, and it was assumed that passive modelocking of diode-pumped solid-state lasers was very difficult, if not impossible. Key breakthroughs came with the invention of the semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) [1,2] and Kerr-lens modelocking (KLM) [3]. Previously, Q-switching instabilities prevented stable passive modelocking of diode-pumped solid-state lasers for more than 25 years. This breakthrough was enabled through the major progress in solid-state laser technology: first with the discovery of the Ti:sapphire laser material [4] and second with the rapid progress in highpower semiconductor diode-laser arrays to efficiently pump solid-state lasers.For this invited review paper for the special celebration of Volume 100 in Applied Physics B, I will provide some more details describing the events that led to the rapid progress in ultrafast solid-state lasers. I have been actively involved at the frontier of this field for more than 20 years and can provide some more personal insight into how the field evolved. Furthermore, many important results have been ...

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Semiconductor saturable-absorber mirror–assisted Kerr-lens mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser producing pulses in the two-cycle regime

Cited by 374 publications

References 11 publications

High-power ultrafast thin disk laser oscillators and their potential for sub-100-femtosecond pulse generation

High-power ultrafast thin disk laser oscillators and their potential for sub-100-femtosecond pulse generation

What We Can Learn about Ultrashort Pulses by Linear Optical Methods

Ultrafast solid-state laser oscillators: a success story for the last 20 years with no end in sight

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