Femtosecond surface emitting lasers

A. C. Tropper

doi:10.1117/12.873817

21 February 2011 Femtosecond surface emitting lasers

A. C. Tropper

Proceedings Volume 7919, Vertical External Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VECSELs); 79190Y (2011) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.873817
Event: SPIE LASE, 2011, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

Diode-pumped solid state lasers, long dominant in many high power applications, now face a challenge from opticallypumped semiconductor lasers, which add spectral versatility to the good beam quality and potential for power-scaling that are characteristic of optically-pumped disc lasers. The vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting semiconductor laser, or VECSEL, readily exhibits passive mode-locking with the inclusion of a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) in the external cavity. These devices most often emit picosecond pulses, recruiting only a small fraction of the available gain bandwidth of the quantum wells. If the dispersive and filtering effects of the multilayer gain and saturable absorber structures are well-controlled, however, it is possible to observe clean sub-picosecond pulses of duration down to 100fs and below. The presentation will describe SESAM-mode-locked VECSELs based on compressively strained InGaAs/GaAs quantum wells that generate trains of near-transform-limited femtosecond pulses at wavelengths around 1 μm with average power of 30 - 300 mW. The nonlinear optical response of the quantum well SESAM in this regime is investigated using a numerical model in which the resonantly excited carriers are coupled by scattering to states outside the laser bandwidth.

Citation Download Citation

A. C. Tropper "Femtosecond surface emitting lasers", Proc. SPIE 7919, Vertical External Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VECSELs), 79190Y (21 February 2011); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.873817

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