Abstract

Ultra-fast lasers are highly advanced tools in various applications such as medicine, micromachining or spectroscopy. Nevertheless their use could be even broader if reliability, costs and compactness were improved. Different solutions exist for mode-locking a laser cavity and generating ultrashort pulses. Some drawbacks related to these mode-locking mechanisms are still present and limit the use of such laser systems. For example, non-linear polarisation evolution based mechanism leads to lasers for which pulsed operation is very sensitive to external parameters like temperature; despite of their efficiency, semiconductor saturable absorbers have limited lifetime compared to the other components in a fiber laser cavity. We investigate here another solution for mode-locking in order to circumvent some of the classical impairments of this technology.

© 2013 IEEE