Semiconductor saturable absorber mirror mode-locked Yb:YLF laser with pulses of 40 fs

Abstract

We have generated pulses as short as 40 fs with an average power of 265 mW from a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) mode-locked Yb:YLF oscillator employing a 1% transmitting output coupler (OC). The room-temperature laser is pumped by a low-cost 960 nm single-emitter multimode diode and dispersion compensation is provided via double chirped mirrors (DCMs). The 40-fs pulses are centered around 1050 nm with a width of 34 nm at a repetition rate of 87.3 MHz. By increasing the output coupling to 5% and by using Gires–Tournois interferometer (GTI) mirrors for dispersion compensation, we have also demonstrated 380-fs pulses with 1.85 W of average power around 1025 nm at a repetition rate of 190.4 MHz. Using an intracavity off-surface optic axis birefringent filter, the central wavelength of the pulses could be tuned in the 1020–1025 nm and 1019–1047 nm ranges for the 5% and 1% transmitting OCs, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, these are the shortest pulses and highest average and peak powers generated from room-temperature Yb:YLF lasers to date.