Efficient and tunable diode-pumped femtosecond Yb:glass lasers.

Diode-pumped Yb:phosphate and Yb:silicate glass lasers have been passively mode locked for the first time to the authors' knowledge. Reliable self-starting mode locking without critical cavity alignment has been achieved with intracavity semiconductor saturable-absorber mirrors and soliton mode locking. We generated pulses as short as 58 fs with the Yb:phosphate laser and 61 fs with the Yb:silicate laser at average output powers of 65 and 53 mW, respectively.

Experimental verification of soliton mode locking using only a slow saturable absorber.

We demonstrate experimentally that solid-state lasers with strong solitonlike pulse shaping can be mode locked by a slow saturable absorber only, i.e., the response time is much slower than the width of the soliton.

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

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.

Diode-pumped 100-fs passively mode-locked Cr:LiSAF laser with an antiresonant Fabry-Perot saturable absorber.

We demonstrate a self-starting passively mode-locked diode-pumped Cr:LiSAF laser, achieving pulses as short as 98 fs with an average power as high as 50 mW. In continuous-wave operation, we demonstrate 140 mW of output power with a tunability of 100 nm FWHM. These results were achieved by use of lower Cr(3+) doping (1.