Abstract
We present semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs) that can potentially support femtosecond pulses from ultrafast thin disk lasers (TDLs) with high average power approaching the kW-power level and high pulse energy in the range of 100 µJ to 1 mJ at megahertz pulse repetition rates. For high-power operation, the SESAM parameters will ultimately limit the shortest pulse duration from a soliton mode-locked laser before mode locking instabilities such as multiple pulsing instabilities and continuous wave (cw) breakthrough start to occur. Currently shorter pulses are prevented due to the inverse saturable absorption that becomes stronger with shorter pulses and results in a shift of the "rollover" of the nonlinear SESAM reflectivity towards lower fluences. Here we discuss a novel SESAM design that addresses these issues and can be grown by metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE), an attractive epitaxial growth technology for manufacturing.
Highlights
Ultrafast solid-state lasers have a tremendous impact in many disciplines of science and technology [1,2,3]
The current state-of-the-art for high-power/high-energy ultrafast laser oscillators is based on semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) mode-locked Yb:YAG thin disk lasers (TDLs) generating either a record high average power of 275 W with 16.9 μJ, 583 fs pulse durations at 16.3 MHz pulse repetition rate [10] or a record high pulse energy of 80 μJ at 242 W average output power, 1 ps pulse durations at 3 MHz [11]
We recently discovered that low-temperature grown InGaAs quantum well (QW) embedded in AlAs barriers can generate electron traps with even faster recombination which remain fast with longer annealing times [42]
Summary
Ultrafast solid-state lasers have a tremendous impact in many disciplines of science and technology [1,2,3]. Today diodepumped solid-state laser amplifier systems seeded by SESAM mode-locked laser oscillators achieved average output powers above 1 kW. We can demonstrate here that we can adjust the SESAM parameters for shorter pulse operation with strain-compensated fast SESAMs with a higher damage threshold and a higher rollover fluence With such SESAMs we should be able to support shorter pulse generation, but we obtain a higher damage threshold and lower thermal lensing when mounted on a better heatsink. We summarize all our results in the final section
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