Abstract

It is well known that solitonlike pulse shaping generates pulses that are both shorter and more stable [1]. However, for modelocking of solid state lasers it has been always assumed that a window of net gain as short as the pulse itself has to be created that supports only the pulse and suppresses the growth of instabilities. We showed by soliton perturbation theory that in a passively modelocked femtosecond solid-state laser with solitonlike pulse shaping the modelocking process can be stabilized by a broadband slow saturable absorber only [2]. This opens the possibility to generate sub-10 fs pulses with semiconductor absorbers. We reach with the technique of soliton modelocking stabilized by a broadband saturable absorber a regime which was previously only possible with Kerr-Lens Modelocking but our approach is in addition self-starting.

© 1996 IEEE