Abstract

A mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser has the potential to produce ultrashort pulses while preserving the high power and tunability inherent in this gain media. Several mode-locking techniques have produced pulses of less than 10 psec duration from a Ti:sapphire laser [1-3], however to date the output powers have been limited to 300 mW. We have previously reported on 6 psec pulses with 750 mW of average power generated by active mode-locking with an acousto-optic modulator [4]. In this paper, we use active mode-locking to generate picosecond pulses with 2.0 W of average power and pulse compression to generate tunable pulses shorter than 50 fsec with 750 mW of average power.

© 1990 Optical Society of America