Abstract
Chromium-doped zinc-selenide is a very promising solid-state medium for tunable sub-picosecond pulse generation, which can be used for spectroscopy, remote sensing, neurosurgery, ophthalmology and other applications. The attractive features of this medium are the broad gain band lying between 2 and 3 micrometers, the high gain cross-section, the good thermal conductivity, the absence of excited-state absorption and large index of nonlinear refraction.1–6 The latter can reduce the threshold of the Kerr-lens mode-locking self-starting. But, as our preliminary experiments have demonstrated,7 this medium has the strong tendency to multipulse operation in the picosecond Kerr-lens mode-locked regime in the absence of the negative group-delay dispersion (GDD) compensation. The ultrashort pulse destabilization due to multistable operation is the common mechanism preventing the pulse width shortening in many solid-state lasers. Following mechanisms of this phenomenon have been considered: the pulse splitting due to the chirp growth,8 the net-gain coefficient increase resulting in the continuum amplification 9 and the higher-order dispersions contribution.10
© 2002 Optical Society of America
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