Abstract

High peak power ultrafast laser sources are widely used in various nonlinear bioimaging modalities. Due to the high cost and complexity of the solid-state lasers most commonly deployed in these applications, there has been a growing motivation in recent years to develop simpler and lower-cost alternatives, such as semiconductor laser diodes. As such, two-photon fluorescence imaging has been achieved by laser diode sources but in all cases requiring a single or multiple semiconductor [1, 2] or fibre [3] amplification stages. Proposing a different approach to power scaling, we present here the first demonstration of a mode-locked laser diode incorporating multiple active regions, for increased output power directly from the oscillator.

© 2015 IEEE