Ultrashort pulse Ti:sapphire oscillators pumped by optically pumped semiconductor (OPS) pump lasers

Abstract

Ultrashort pulse (USP) Ti:Sapphire oscillators are constantly improving in cost, performance, and reliability. These improvements have been driven in part by improvements in the CW lasers used to pump the Ti:Sapphire gain medium. Recent development of optically-pumped semiconductor (OPS) lasers heralds a USP pump source that reduces cost and complexity while maintaining a high standard of performance and reliability. OPS lasers offer significant advantages with respect to traditional diode-pumped solid state (DPSS) lasers in regards to wavelength flexibility, broad pump tolerance, efficient spectral and spatial brightness conversion and high power scaling. In this paper, we report the performance of different types of ultrashort pulse Ti:Sapphire oscillators pumped by OPS lasers: broad bandwidth (approximately 100 nm) negative dispersion mirror based, broad bandwidth (approximately 100 nm) prism based, and narrower bandwidth (approximately 10 nm) tunable prism based oscillator. We analyze the impact of multimode spatial mode operation of the OPS pump laser on the mode quality, bandwidth and intensity noise of the USP oscillator output. We compare the performance of USP oscillators pumped by multiple transverse mode OPS lasers with traditional single transverse mode Nd:YVO₄ DPSS lasers. We demonstrate excellent regenerative amplifier seeding with the OPS pumped Ti:Sapphire oscillator.