Recent advances in ultrafast semiconductor disk lasers

By B. Tilma, M. Mangold, C. Zaugg, S. Link, D. Waldburger, A. Klenner, A. Mayer, E. Gini, M. Golling, Ursula Keller. Light: Science & Applications, 2015

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The performance of ultrafast semiconductor disk lasers has rapidly advanced in recent decades. The strong interest from industry for inexpensive, compact, and reliable ultrafast laser sources in the picosecond and femtosecond domains has driven this technology toward commercial products. Frequency metrology and biomedical applications would benefit from sub-200-femtosecond pulse durations with peak powers in the kilowatt range. The aim of this review is to briefly describe the market potential and give an overview of the current status of mode-locked semiconductor disk lasers. Particular focus is placed on the ongoing efforts to achieve shorter pulses with higher peak powers. As small, ultrashort-pulse lasers with high peak powers, semiconductor thin-disk lasers hold promise for spectroscopy, metrology and imaging. Bauke Tilma and co-workers from ETH Zurich review recent progress in developing such lasers for these applications. They report how the latest designs of external-cavity disk lasers that are passively mode locked using a saturable absorber now offer repetition rates of up to 100 gigahertz, pulse durations of shorter than 200 femtoseconds and peak powers in the kilowatt range. The compact design, excellent noise performance and customizable emission wavelength of such sources make them highly attractive for a variety of applications. Future research into the materials providing the optical gain and saturable absorption in such lasers is likely to further improve their efficiency, reliability and thermal stability.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/953834cba4769c9dcdb1fc4b5578032260ca38cf

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Optically pumped VECSELs: review of technology and progress (2017, background): “A more comprehensive open access review on the overall parameters and technology has been published in 2015 by Tilma et al [7].”
Mechanisms of spatiotemporal mode-locking (2019, background): “Nonetheless, it constitutes a major simplification, one that has been widely used for many years in modelling single-mode oscillators utilizing nonlinear polarization rotation [6].”