Scaling of the antiresonant Fabry–Perot saturable absorber design toward a thin saturable absorber

Abstract

We demonstrate and discuss the scaling of the antiresonant Fabry-Perot saturable absorber toward a novel antiref lection-coated thin saturable absorber. With a Ti:sapphire laser we obtained self-starting Kerr-lens mode-locked pulses as short as 19 fs. With the higher modulation depth of the thin saturable absorber we obtained soliton mode-locked self-starting 34-fs pulses over the full cavity stability regime with a significantly shorter mode-locking buildup time. The pulse duration was limited only by the semiconductor Bragg mirror.