Generation of femtosecond high-power optical pulses from a hybrid mode-locked semiconductor laser

Abstract

Compact and efficient sources of high repetition rate, high peak power optical pulses are needed to replace the standard ultrashort optical pulse generation schemes because of their relatively large size and poor wall plug efficiency. In this paper, we present a hybrid mode-locked semiconductor laser system that is capable of producing optical pulses of 207 fsec in duration with peak powers in excess of 150 W. To the best of our knowledge, these optical pulses are both the shortest and most intense ever produced from an all-semiconductor laser diode system. The optical pulses were generated by forming a hybrid mode-locked external cavity semiconductor laser, which incorporates a GaAs/AlGaAs semiconductor traveling wave amplifier as the gain medium, a multiple quantum well (MQW) saturable absorber, and a four-prism sequence to compensate for group velocity dispersion.