Abstract
A tunable solid-state laser, such as a Ti:sapphire laser, is a reliable alternative to dye lasers for ultrashort pulse generation. With an effective fast saturable absorber, using a Kerr nonlinearity, an all solid-state femtosecond laser technology has been demonstrated.1 However, this mode-locking process is not self-starting and requires another starting mechanism, such as, for example, a real saturable absorber.2 Typically, a real saturable absorber is based on absorption bleaching. Real semiconductor saturable absorbers are attractive because they can cover band gaps from the visible to the infrared and can be fast (< ps), using low-temperature-MBE growth. However, given a certain material the tunability was limited to <30 nm for KLM Ti:sapphire laser and <50 nm for an RPM Ti:sapphire laser without dispersion compensation,3 In the latter, the pulse duration strongly increases from 2 to 10 ps over the tuning range.
© 1992 Optical Society of America
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