Diode-pumped Yb:Sr(3)Y(BO(3))(3) femtosecond laser

We have developed a diode-pumped Yb(3+)Sr(3)Y(BO(3))(3) (Yb:BOYS) laser generating 69-fs pulses, at a central wavelength of 1062 nm. This laser is mode locked by use of a semiconductor saturable-absorber mirror and emits 80 mW of average power at 113 MHz. This is, to our knowledge, the first mode-locked Yb:BOYS laser and the shortest duration obtained from an ytterbium laser with a crystalline host. The central wavelength can be tuned from 1051 to 1070 nm, for sub-100-fs pulses. We have also achieved an average power as high as 300 mW with pulse duration of 86 fs at 1068 nm.     

Frequency doubling of femtosecond erbium-fiber soliton lasers in periodically poled lithium niobate

We report efficient frequency doubling of passively mode-locked femtosecond erbium-fiber lasers. Quasi-phase-matched second-harmonic generation in periodically poled lithium niobate is used to generate 8.1 mW of 190-fs (FWHM), 90-pJ pulses at 777 nm with a conversion efficiency greater than can be obtained with existing birefringently phase-matched nonlinear materials. A dispersion-compensation-free soliton oscillator generating transform-limited 230-fs (FWHM) pulses at 1554 nm is used as a pump laser.     

Broadly tunable femtosecond Cr:LiSAF laser

We demonstrate wavelength tunability of femtosecond pulses over a range of more than 50 nm from a diode-pumped Cr:LiSAF laser. The mode-locking mechanism can be explained by soliton mode locking that is started and stabilized by a broadband semiconductor saturable-absorber mirror designed for low loss over the full reflection bandwidth of the underlying Bragg mirrors, which ultimately limits tunability. We obtain 45-fs pulses at 105-mW average output power and a maximum mode-locked average output power of 125 mW with 60-fs pulses.     

Er:Yb-doped waveguide laser fabricated by femtosecond laser pulses

Laser action is demonstrated in a 20-mm-long waveguide fabricated on an Er:Yb-doped phosphate glass by femtosecond laser pulses. An output power of 1.7 mW with approximately 300 mW of pump power coupled into the waveguide is obtained at 1533.5 nm. Waveguides are manufactured with the 520-nm radiation from a frequency-doubled, diode-pumped, cavity-dumped Yb:glass laser operating at a 166-KHz repetition rate, with a 300-fs pulse duration.     

Generation of 90-fs pulses from a mode-locked diode-pumped Yb(3+):Ca(4)GdO(BO(3))(3) laser

A diode-pumped Yb>(3+):Ca(4)GdO(BO>(3))(3) (Yb:GdCOB) laser generating 90-fs pulses at a center wavelength of 1045 nm is demonstrated. This is, to our knowledge, the shortest pulse duration obtained from an ytterbium laser with a crystalline host. This laser is mode locked with a high-finesse semiconductor saturable-absorber mirror and emits 40 mW of average power at a repetition rate of 100 MHz.     

Diode-pumped 10-fs Cr3+:LiCAF laser

We demonstrate 10-fs pulses from a diode-pumped, soft-aperture Kerr lens mode-locked Cr3+:LiCAF laser with a spectral bandwidth of 150 nm and 40 mW of output power at a repetition rate of 110 MHz. For dispersion compensation, double-chirped mirrors and prisms are used. The pulses are characterized by use of spectral shearing interferometry.     

High-power intracavity frequency doubling of a Ti:sapphire femtosecond oscillator

We demonstrate intracavity frequency doubling of a standard femtosecond Ti:sapphire oscillator. The cavity is extended with a pair of focusing mirrors and a 0.5-mm-thick BBO crystal. We achieve a repetition rate of 50 MHz and simultaneously generate 22 mW of 55-fs pulses at 810 nm and 200 mW of 73-fs pulses at 405 nm, which corresponds to 4 nJ per pulse. We create a total of 330-mW, 405-nm light when pumping the Ti:sapphire crystal with 5.7 W from an Ar-ion laser, corresponding to a conversion efficiency of 5.7%. No saturation is found, which implies that higher outputs can be achieved with higher pump rates. Preliminary results from the use of blue pulses as pump in an optical parametric amplifier seeded by pulses from a photonic crystal fiber are presented. Received: 27 January 2003 / Revised version: 27 March 2003 / Published online: 12 May 2003 RID="*" ID="*"Corresponding author. Fax: +45-861/96199, E-mail: tva@chem.au.dk     

Gires-Tournois干涉镜补偿色散的自启动飞秒Cr4+:YAG激光器实验研究

利用一片GTI镜补偿腔内色散,并使用宽带半导体可饱和吸收片,实现了锁模自启动的飞秒Cr⁴⁺:YAG激光输出.在9W平均功率的1030nm激光抽运下,获得输出脉冲功率为95 mW,光谱半高全宽45 nm,中心波长1508 nm,实测脉冲宽度为65 fs.     

Efficient and tunable diode-pumped femtosecond Yb:glass lasers

Diode-pumped Yb:phosphate and Yb:silicate glass lasers have been passively mode locked for the first time to the authors' knowledge. Reliable self-starting mode locking without critical cavity alignment has been achieved with intracavity semiconductor saturable-absorber mirrors and soliton mode locking. We generated pulses as short as 58 fs with the Yb:phosphate laser and 61 fs with the Yb:silicate laser at average output powers of 65 and 53 mW, respectively. The pulse repetition rate was 112 MHz. Additionally, we demonstrated tunability of femtosecond pulses from 1025 to 1065 nm for the Yb:phosphate and from 1030 to 1082 nm for the Yb:silicate glasses. The highest mode-locked output power was 405 mW, with 183-fs pulses from the phosphate glass. The diode pump power was 1.68 W, corresponding to 24% optical-to-optical efficiency. The highest cw output power was 510 mW at the same incident pump power.     

High-power 100-fs pulse generation by frequency doubling of an erbium ytterbium-fiber master oscillator power amplifier

Frequency doubling of an erbium-ytterbium-fiber master-oscillator-power-amplifier system is demonstrated. Simultaneous amplification and pulse compression in multimode erbium-ytterbium-doped fibers produces high-quality near-diffraction and near-bandwidth-limited 100-fs pulses at a wavelength of 1.62microm with an average power of 230 mW at a repetition rate of 52 MHz. Periodically poled LiNbO(3) allows for frequency doubling with a conversion efficiency of 51%, producing near-bandwidth-limited 105-fs pulses with an average power of 117 mW and a pulse energy of 2.3 nJ at a wavelength of 810 nm.     

Generation of 207-femtosecond pulses from a ytterbium figure-of-eight fibre laser

We report the generation of 207-fs pulses with 1.2mW average power at 1036nm directly from a passively mode-locked Yb-doped fibre laser with a nonlinear optical loop mirror for mode-locking and pairs of diffraction gratings for intracavity dispersion compensation. These results imply a 4-fold reduction in pulse duration over previously reported figure-of-eight cavity passively mode-locked Yb-doped fibre lasers. Stable pulse trains are produced at the fundamental repetition rate of the resonator, 24.0MHz. On the other hand, this laser offers a cleaner spectrum and greater stability and is completely self-starting.     

Widely tunable femtosecond soliton pulse generation at a 10-GHz repetition rate by use of the soliton self-frequency shift in photonic crystal fiber

We demonstrate a soliton self-frequency shift of approximately 120 nm in a fiber with 1.56-microm pulses generated at a 10-GHz repetition rate by an actively mode-locked laser. A highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber with a length of only 12.6 m and a nonlinear coefficient of 62 W(-1) km(-1) is used to achieve such broadband operation. The wavelengths of the resulting sub-300-fs solitons can be tuned effectively by adjusting the input power. The maximum output power of the solitons exceeds 200 mW.     

Cross-validation of theoretically quantified fiber continuum generation and absolute pulse measurement by MIIPS for a broadband coherently controlled optical source

The predicted spectral phase of a fiber continuum pulsed source rigorously quantified by the scalar generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation is found to be in excellent agreement with that measured by multiphoton intrapulse interference phase scan (MIIPS) with background subtraction. This cross-validation confirms the absolute pulse measurement by MIIPS and the transform-limited compression of the fiber continuum pulses by the pulse shaper performing the MIIPS measurement, and permits the subsequent coherent control on the fiber continuum pulses by this pulse shaper. The combination of the fiber continuum source with the MIIPS-integrated pulse shaper produces compressed transform-limited 9.6 fs (FWHM) pulses or arbitrarily shaped pulses at a central wavelength of 1020 nm, an average power over 100 mW, and a repetition rate of 76 MHz. In comparison to the 229-fs pump laser pulses that generate the fiber continuum, the compressed pulses reflect a compression ratio of 24.     

Pulse characteristics of an optical parametric oscillator pumped by sub-30-fs light pulses

We obtained nearly transform-limited light pulses of 34 fs near 1.2 microm by pumping an optical parametric oscillator with a 2-mm-long KTP crystal by 26-fs pulses from a Ti:sapphire laser. The average power of the pulses that were obtained was greater than 50 mW, at an 80-MHz repetition rate. Attempts to downscale the pulse duration by decreasing the pump-pulse duration revealed remarkable limitations of the attainable pulse length for sub-30-fs pump pulses, in accordance with a recent theoretical study [J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 17, 741 (2000)].     

High-average-power femtosecond pulse generation in the blue using BiB3O6

Efficient generation of tunable femtosecond pulses in the blue is reported in the nonlinear crystal BiB3O6. By use of fundamental pulses from a mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser at 76 MHz, single-pass second-harmonic average powers of as much as 830 mW have been generated at 50% conversion efficiency, and a tunable range of 375-435 nm in the blue is demonstrated. Temporal measurements using cross correlation of the fundamental and second-harmonic pulses in a 100-microm-thick beta-BaB2O4 crystal result in blue pulse durations of 220 fs for 130-fs fundamental pulses. Direct experimental comparison with beta-BaB2O4 confirms the superior performance BiB3O6 for second-harmonic generation of femtosecond pulses.     

Self-starting five optical cycle pulse generation in Cr<Superscript>4+</Superscript>:YAG laser

We report stable self-starting near-transform-limited 26-fs pulses at 250-mW output power from a Kerr-lens mode-locked (KLM) Cr⁴⁺:YAG laser using chirped mirrors in combination with prisms. The highest output power achieved in KLM regime was 600 mW at 55-fs pulse duration. The experimental results agree well with the results of theoretical analysis with respect to KLM self-starting ability and stability against continuous-wave and multi-pulse operation. Parameter ranges for stable transform-limited KLM pulses as well as the shortest achievable pulse durations are established. Using an InGaAs-InP semiconductor saturable absorber mirror we could obtain self-starting 57-fs pulses at the average output power of 200 mW. Two-photon absorption was found to be the main mechanism favoring the multiple-pulse operation. Received: 2 May 2002 / Revised version: 16 July 2002 / Published online: 8 January 2003 RID="*" ID="*"Corresponding author. Fax: +43-1/58801-38799, E-mail: sorokina@tuwien.ac.at     

Sum frequency generation of continuously tunable blue pulses from a two-branch femtosecond fiber source

We report on the generation of femtosecond blue pulses from a two-branch mode-locked erbium-doped fiber source. This is achieved by sum-frequency mixing in β-barium borate between the frequency doubled laser radiation at 770 nm and a tunable near-infrared component generated inside a highly nonlinear fiber. Small angle tuning of the nonlinear crystal leads to a continuously variable output wavelength in the visible band between 460 nm and 500 nm. Average power levels exceeding 1.5 mW were collected throughout the entire tuning range of our device, which delivered sub-300-fs pulses at a repetition rate of 98 MHz. These values indicate that the input near-infrared radiation is up-converted with a photon efficiency of 20%.     

Generation of high-energy broadband femtosecond deep-ultraviolet pulses by highly nondegenerate noncollinear four-wave mixing in a thin transparent solid

We present a simple and efficient technique for the generation of ultrashort deep-ultraviolet pulses based on four-wave mixing of noncollinear laser pulses in a thin solid. Sub-30-fs pulses (Fourier-limit of 13 fs) centered at 270 nm, with energies up to 6 μJ, were obtained by mixing the fundamental and the second harmonic of a Ti:sapphire amplifier in fused silica. Temporal characterization was performed with a dispersionless self-diffraction FROG setup. Spectra as broad as 20 nm were also obtained that can in principle support sub-4-fs deep-ultraviolet pulses.The results are well described by two-dimensional numerical simulations.     

Generation of high-energy, sub-20-fs pulses in the deep ultraviolet by using spectral broadening during filamentation in argon

Generation of sub-20-fs UV pulses with more than 300 μJ energy at 268 nm is reported. First, the UV pulses are produced by successive second-harmonic and third-harmonic (TH) generation of 805 nm pulses of a 1 kHz Ti:sapphire laser amplifier. The spectral broadening of TH pulses is realized in a filament, generated in argon. The produced pulses are compressed in a simple double-pass prism-pair compressor. Starting from 100 fs pulses, we achieve a fivefold pulse shortening.     

Efficient noncollinear parametric amplification of weak femtosecond pulses in the visible and near-infrared spectral range

We report measurement of efficient amplification of weak femtosecond supercontinuum seed pulses by use of a noncollinear optical parametric process in BBO crystal pumped with 150-fs pulses from a frequency-doubled regenerative-amplified Ti:sapphire laser at 390nm . The highest amplification factor, 10(8) , was achieved for 3x10(-16)J energy seed pulses at wavelength of 560nm.