Abstract

Femtosecond or picosecond pulses with repetition rates in the kHz and MHz range are required for manifold applications such as micromachining, material processing, fluorescence spectroscopy, biomedical systems and nonlinear optics. A well-known technique to generate such pulses is mode locking of lasers. However, the pulse repetition rate of these devices depends on cavity length and is in the GHz or high MHz range. To reduce the repetition frequency pulse pickers are used, which pick certain pulses out of a pulse train. Commonly these pickers are based on Pockels cells, acousto-optical modulators, electro-optical modulators or integrated optical Mach-Zehnder modulators. But all these components are relatively large in size, expensive, they need adjustment and the modulation frequency to pick out the pulses is limited.

© 2009 IEEE