Femtosecond surface-emitting lasers

Tropper, A.C. (2011) Femtosecond surface-emitting lasers. Keller, Ursula (ed.) In Vertical External Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VECSELs). vol. 7919, SPIE. 7 pp . (doi:10.1117/12.873817).

Abstract

Diode-pumped solid state lasers, long dominant in many high power applications, now face a challenge from optically pumped semiconductor lasers, which add spectral versatility to the good beam quality and potential for power-scaling that are characteristic of optically-pumped disc lasers. The vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting semiconductor laser, or VECSEL, readily exhibits passive mode-locking with the inclusion of a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) in the external cavity. These devices most often emit picosecond pulses, recruiting only a small fraction of the available gain bandwidth of the quantum wells. If the dispersive and filtering effects of the multilayer gain and saturable absorber structures are well-controlled, however, it is possible to observe clean sub-picosecond pulses of duration down to 100fs and below. The presentation will describe SESAM-mode-locked VECSELs based on compressively strained InGaAs/GaAs quantum wells that generate trains of near-transform-limited femtosecond pulses at wavelengths around 1 µm with average power of 30 - 300 mW. The nonlinear optical response of the quantum well SESAM in this regime is investigated using a numerical model in which the resonantly excited carriers are coupled by scattering to states outside the laser bandwidth.

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