Active stabilisation and timing jitter characterisation of sub-500 fs pulse passively modelocked VECSEL

Abstract

An optical Stark modelocked vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting laser producing sub-500 fs pulses at a fundamental repetition rate of 1 GHz was actively stabilised by locking its output to a 10 MHz electrical oscillator using a programmable phase-locked-loop frequency synthesiser. The timing jitter was characterised by the von der Linde method and was found to be 190(12) fs in the bandwidth 300 Hz to 1.5 MHz.