Distributed Kerr Lens Mode-Locked Yb:YAG Thin-Disk Oscillator

Jinwei Zhang,Dominik Bauer,Marcus Seidel,Ka Fai Mak,Zhiyi Wei,Vladimir Kalashnikov,Oleg Pronin,Markus Pӧtzlberger,Vladimir Pervak,Qing Wang,Jonathan Brons,Alexander Apolonski,Ferenc Krausz,Dirk Sutter

doi:10.34133/2022/9837892

Abstract

Ultrafast laser oscillators are indispensable tools for diverse applications in scientific research and industry. When the phases of the longitudinal laser cavity modes are locked, pulses as short as a few femtoseconds can be generated. As most high-power oscillators are based on narrow-bandwidth materials, the achievable duration for high-power output is usually limited. Here, we present a distributed Kerr lens mode-locked Yb:YAG thin-disk oscillator which generates sub-50 fs pulses with spectral widths far broader than the emission bandwidth of the gain medium at full width at half maximum. Simulations were also carried out, indicating good qualitative agreement with the experimental results. Our proof-of-concept study shows that this new mode-locking technique is pulse energy and average power scalable and applicable to other types of gain media, which may lead to new records in the generation of ultrashort pulses.

Highlights

The progress on the development of ultrafast oscillators has been subject to intensive research driven by diverse applications in physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and industry [1,2,3,4]
The thickness of the KM was increased to 2 mm with more than two nonlinear plates inserted in order to ease the initiation of mode locking
We demonstrated a novel mode-locking technique named distributed Kerr lens modelocking (DKLM) based on an Yb:YAG thin-disk oscillator

Summary

Introduction

The progress on the development of ultrafast oscillators has been subject to intensive research driven by diverse applications in physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and industry [1,2,3,4]. Passive mode locking has been the most effective method for generating ultrashort pulses from laser oscillators [5,6,7,8,9,10]. Despite the widespread commercial availability of mode-locked lasers, research on new mode-locking techniques is still ongoing. This quest is primarily driven by the desire for a universal technique that is applicable across different laser types and one that can generate the shortest possible pulse. A few methods were used to generate ultrashort pulses directly from passive mode-locked oscillators, such as using broadband gain material [12,13,14], improving dispersion management [15], and introducing spectral filtering [16]. In 1975, Haus [17] showed that the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, used for modelling the behavior of mode-locked oscillators, can be solved

Methods

Results

Conclusion