Design and operation of antiresonant Fabry–Perot saturable semiconductor absorbers for mode-locked solid-state lasers

Brovelli, L. R.; Keller, U.; Chiu, T. H.

doi:10.1364/josab.12.000311

Cited by 148 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Such a device exhibits higher reflectivity for higher pulse fluences and therefore favors pulsed over CW operation. The key advantage of the SESAM is its large flexibility to optimize the absorber parameters [33,34], which prevents mode locking instabilities such as Q-switched mode locking [35]. SESAM designs for high-power thin disk lasers often use a dielectric top coating for the reduction of two-photon absorption (Fig.…”

Section: Mode-locked Thin Disk Lasersmentioning

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: Mode-locked Thin Disk Lasersmentioning

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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“…They are used as a direct input into theoretical guidelines to guarantee suppression of unwanted Q-switching instabilities with relatively simple expressions relating controllable design features of the laser and the SESAM device such that Q-switched modelocking can be avoided [52,53]. Once the device design is optimized [86,87], a semiconductor wafer fabrication allows these devices to be produced economically, and ultimately in large volumes.…”

Section: Semiconductor Saturable Absorber Mirror (Sesam)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The different A-FPSA structure design parameters and their variations have been discussed in Refs. [92] and [86]. Ultimately the top reflector of the A-FPSA (Fig.…”

Section: Innovation and Evolution Of The Sesam Conceptmentioning

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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“…The fast, few hundred femtosecond, impulse response combined with modest <1% modulation depth in the absorber effectively suppresses ASE [11,12]. The relatively slower recovery of available absorbers, typically tens of picoseconds [13], has no measureable effect on contrast.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparative study on the temporal contrast of femtosecond mode-locked laser oscillators

Stuart¹,

Robinson²,

Hopps³

et al. 2016

Opt. Lett.

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We have investigated the temporal intensity contrast characteristics from a broad range of mode-locked shortpulse oscillators used for seeding high-power terawatt and petawatt class laser systems. Saturable absorber (SESAM), Kerr-lens (KLM), nonlinear polarization evolution (NPE) in optical fibers and synchronously pumped optical parametric oscillator (OPO) mode-locked sources have been measured using a third-order autocorrelator with up to 10 10 dynamic range. We restricted the temporal characterization to features <30ps about the laser pulse that reflect fundamental mode-locking processes. We find additional nonlinear terms and residual higher-order dispersion limits the performance of KLM and NPE sources up to the 10 5 contrast level, whilst >10 8 contrast was observed from the SESAM and OPO laser pulse trains.OCIS codes : (140.4050) (140.3580) Lasers, solidstate; (190.4360) Nonlinear optics, devices; (140.7090 The temporal intensity contrast of the short-pulse laser oscillator pulse that seeds a high-intensity laser system sets a baseline noise level for amplification to terawatt to petawatt peak-powers that are focussed onto targets at optical intensities approaching 10 22 W/cm 2 . The femtosecond to nanosecond dynamics of laser-matter experiments using these sources are crucially altered by any optical intensity noise above ~10 9 -10 10 W/cm 2 that can ionize matter and form a plasma that expands away from the target before the arrival of the primary laser pulse [1,2].In addition to a high-contrast output, sources that are suitable for seeding high-energy, high peak-power laser systems are typically <500fs in duration and their emission bandwidth typically selected to be compatible with large aperture Nd:Glass amplifiers to achieve terawatt to petawatt peak-powers.Previous investigations into the temporal contrast of short-pulse oscillators by Braun et al. compared Kerr Lens (KLM) and saturable absorber mode-locked sources using a high dynamic range secondorder autocorrelator [3]. They observed that cavities employing saturable absorbers exhibit strong suppression of ASE and other weak temporal noise features to generate >10 8 contrast pulses and that KLM sources produced considerably greater optical noise, with pedestals observed at the 10 -5 intensity level.With recent advances in laser technology, particularly with compact turn-key fibre-based ytterbium lasers [4,5] and femtosecond-pumped optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) [6,7], a broader and more detailed comparison of these laser sources is now needed. Here we present an investigation of the temporal intensity contrast across a wide-range of mode-locking schemes used in laser oscillator sources suitable, and currently used, for seeding high-power laser systems in the 1μm region, underpinning a wide range of high intensity laser matter interaction experiments. These new measurements have used a third-order autocorrelator that provides observation of asymmetric temporal processes with up to 10 10 dynamic range for the ~1-15nJ, <350fs, 70-80MHz ...

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Design and operation of antiresonant Fabry–Perot saturable semiconductor absorbers for mode-locked solid-state lasers

Cited by 148 publications

References 21 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

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

Comparative study on the temporal contrast of femtosecond mode-locked laser oscillators

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