The operation of femtosecond lasers based on Kerr Lens Mode Locking is reviewed. We describe our home-made Ti:sapphire laser that produces pulses as short as 10 femtoseconds. Critical issues such as dispersion compensation and pulse measurement techniques will be addressed. We propose to characterize mode-locked laser pulses through a parameter that we call the "Pulse Quality Factor", in a way similar to the Beam Quality Factor used for optical beams. We show how the temporal second-order moments needed to evaluate the Pulse Quality Factor can be obtained directly from the autocorrelation trace and the spectral intensity distribution of a short laser pulse.
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