Experimental verification of soliton mode locking using only a slow saturable absorber

Abstract

We demonstrate experimentally that solid-state lasers with strong solitonlike pulse shaping can be mode locked by a slow saturable absorber only, i.e., the response time is much slower than the width of the soliton. A Ti:sapphire laser mode locked by a low-temperature-grown GaAs absorber with 10-ps recovery time generates pulses as short as 300 fs without the need for Kerr-lens mode locking and critical cavity alignment. An extrapolation of this result would predict that an ≈100-fs recovery time of a semiconductor absorber could support pulses into the 10-fs regime.

© 1995 Optical Society of America

Stabilization of solitonlike pulses with a slow saturable absorber

F. X. Kärtner and U. Keller
Opt. Lett. 20(1) 16-18 (1995)

Hidden mechanism for mode locking solid-state lasers by use of a slow off-resonant saturable absorber

J. Herrmann and M. Müller
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Scaling of the antiresonant Fabry–Perot saturable absorber design toward a thin saturable absorber

I. D. Jung, L. R. Brovelli, M. Kamp, U. Keller, and M. Moser
Opt. Lett. 20(14) 1559-1561 (1995)

Diode-pumped mode-locked Nd:glass lasers with an antiresonant Fabry–Perot saturable absorber

D. Kopf, F. X. Kärtner, U. Keller, and K. J. Weingarten
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Design and operation of antiresonant Fabry–Perot saturable semiconductor absorbers for mode-locked solid-state lasers

L. R. Brovelli, U. Keller, and T. H. Chiu
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 12(2) 311-322 (1995)