Commercial mode-locked vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting lasers

摘要

Ti:sapphire lasers are used in many applications such as nonlinear-microscopy. However, Ti-sapphire laser systems are typically expensive and have a large form factor which consequently limits the availability and compactness of applications requiring these systems. In applications where the benefits of a smaller footprint outweigh the drawbacks of a reduced spectral flexibility, mode-locked Vertical-External-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser (VECSEL) systems provide a low-cost alternative for Ti-sapphire laser technology. Nevertheless, mode-locked Ti:sapphire lasers typically operate on repetition rates around 100 MHz, whereas mode-locked VECSELs typically operate in the GHz repetition rate regime as the short upper-state carrier lifetime can lead to multi-pulsing behavior for repetition rates in the MHz-regime [1]. This has so far hampered their implementation in nonlinear microscopes.