Abstract

Among the various femtosecond laser oscillators that are commonly used as optical frequency combs in a wide range of fields, Ti:sapphire oscillators offer the advantage of operating at the highest repetition rates, supporting the shortest pulses with octave-spanning spectra directly from the laser, and exhibiting very low residual frequency noise due to the high quality factor of their resonators. However, they require a pump laser with excellent beam quality emitting around 532nm and show inferior performance when operated with non-ideal pump laser. Recently, several cost-efficient alternative pump lasers with smaller footprints than the most commonly used bulky and costly frequency-doubled single-longitudinal-mode (SLM) diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) lasers became commercially available.

© 2013 IEEE