Abstract

Easy-to-use and miniaturized laser systems emitting short infrared light pulses with high pulse energies are more and more requested for applications in material processing, display technology, fluorescence spectroscopy, metrology and LIDAR. Mode locking in lasers is a well known technique to generate pulses with pulse lengths ranging from femtoseconds to picoseconds. However, the repetition rate of the emitted pulses depends on the total cavity length and is usually in the GHz or high MHz range and is thus too large for many applications. To reduce the repetition frequency to values in the range from kHz to 100 MHz, so-called pulse pickers are used, which select certain pulses out of a pulse train. Commonly these pickers are based on Pockels cells, acousto-optical modulators, electro-optical modulators or integrated optical Mach-Zehnder modulators. But all of these components are relatively large in size, expensive and the modulation frequency to select the pulses is limited.

© 2011 Optical Society of America