Abstract
Various scientific and industrial laser applications benefit from oscillators providing femtosecond pulses with pulse energies in the microjoule regime at megahertz repetition rates. For these oscillators Yb-doped thin disk materials are attractive because they offer the opportunity of high-power diode-pumping at a low thermal load and thus excellent beam quality. Moreover, the Yb-doped gain materials enable the generation of femtosecond pulses owing to the relatively broad emission spectra. For materials such as Yb:YAG, Yb:KY(WO4)2 but also Yb:Lu2O3 femtosecond high power operation has already been succesfully demonstrated with a thin disk set-up [1,2]. In the case of Yb:YAG power scaling has led to femtosecond pulse generation with energies up to 26 µJ [3]. For Yb:KLu(WO4)2 (Yb:KLuW), pulsed and cw-laser operation has been demonstrated for bulk crystal setups [4]. We present, what is to our knowledge the first passively mode-locked Yb:KLuW thin disk oscillator. The 105 μm thin and 10 % doped Yb:KLuW thin disk crystal is pumped by a fibre coupled pump diode delivering up to 140 W pump power at a wavelength of 980 nm. Passive mode-locking is obtained by a saturable absorber mirror. In order to achieve solitary mode-locking we had to compensate for the material dispersion and Kerr-nonlinearities from both the optical components and the air inside the resonator by using negative dispersive mirrors (GTI).
© 2009 IEEE
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