Femtosecond laser pumped by high-brightness coherent polarization locked diodes

• Main Authors: Purnawirman, Purnawirman, Phua, P. B.
• Other Authors: Temasek Laboratories
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Optics, optoelectronics, photonics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/101668; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/23936
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

We demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, the use of a coherent polarization locked diode as the high-brightness pump source for a femtosecond laser. Four diode emitters are coherently locked to produce more than 5 W linearly polarized, narrow linewidth, and single-lobed pump beam. This gives >10× brightness improvement over the conventional diode array. The diode beam is then used to pump a Yb:KYW laser to obtain 2 W output with 57% slope efficiency in cw laser operation. By using a saturable absorber mirror, we achieved cw mode-locking operation with a 177 fs pulse width at an average power of 0.55 W .