Femtosecond semiconductor laser system with resonator-internal dispersion adaptation.

We present a femtosecond laser diode system that is capable of autonomously adjusting itself to compensate for the external dispersion in an arbitrary application. The laser system contains a spatial light modulator inside the cavity which is controlled by an evolutionary algorithm in order to allow for phase and amplitude shaping of the laser emission. The cavity-internal dispersion control is shown to be much more efficient than an external control with a pulse shaper.

Self-optimizing femtosecond semiconductor laser.

A self-optimizing approach to intra-cavity spectral shaping of external cavity mode-locked semiconductor lasers using edge-emitting multi-section diodes is presented. An evolutionary algorithm generates spectrally resolved phase- and amplitude masks that lead to the utilization of a large part of the net gain spectrum for mode-locked operation. Using these masks as a spectral amplitude and phase filter, a bandwidth of the optical intensity spectrum of 3.