Abstract
Mode-locking of many laser systems can be achieved by interferometric techniques.1,2 When a pulse chirped after traveling through a material with a nonlinear index of refraction is interferometrically recombined with an unchirped pulse, an effective temporal modulation is produced on the time scale of the pulse. In this paper, we describe an interferometric scheme suitable for the mode-locking of diode lasers. It consists of an optical cavity where a Michelson interferometer is used as a cavity mirror; a semiconductor laser amplifier is inserted in one arm of the interferometer. The amplifier provides both the gain to sustain laser action and the nonlinearity needed for pulse chirping. An analysis of the problem shows that conditions can be found where cw oscillations are quenched and where an intense short pulse is above threshold. Simulations have shown that, in the absence of frequency filtering and dispersion, the pulse duration keeps decreasing at each round trip. However, the inclusion of a Lorentzian filter allows the pulse duration to stabilize to a value close to the inverse of the filter bandwidth.
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