Closed form solutions for a simultaneously AM and high-harmonic FM mode locked laser system is presented. Analytical expressions for the pulsewidth and pulsewidth-bandwidth products are derived in terms of the system parameters. The analysis predicts production of 17 ps duration pulses in a Nd:YAG laser mode locked with AM and FM modulators driven at 80 MHz and 1.76 GHz for 1 W modulator input ...

Continous Wave Operation and Mode-Locking of Ti:Sapph Lasers Michael Meehan Department of Physics and Astronomy, BYU Bachelor of Science Titanium-sapphire lasers are useful in condensed matter research because of their ability to be mode-locked, generating ultrafast, regular pulses of coherent radiation. When designing Ti:sapph lasers, their stability in continous wave (CW) operation is often o...

A low-dimensional model is constructed via a variational formulation which characterizes the mode-locking dynamics in a laser cavity with a passive polarizer. The theoretical model accounts explicitly for the effects of the passive polarizer with a Jones matrix. In combination with the nonlinear interaction of the orthogonally polarized electromagnetic fields, the evolution of the mode-locked s...

An ytterbium-doped, mode-locking fiber front-end laser, delivering both a femtosecond seed laser and picosecond was demonstrated. The fundamental repetition rate of the 1031 nm mode-locked 32.77 MHz, realized with all-polarization-maintaining (all-PM) nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM). were delivered after carefully optimizing amplification process. corresponding pulse durations 85 fs 2.8...

Self-localized states or dissipative solitons have the freedom of translation in systems with a homogeneous background. When compared to cavity solitons in coherently driven nonlinear optical systems, laser cavity solitons have the additional freedom of the optical phase. We explore the consequences of this additional Goldstone mode and analyze experimentally and numerically frequency and phase...

Since their development in the late 1980s, cheap, reliable external cavity diode lasers (ECDLs) have replaced complex and expensive traditional dye and Titanium Sapphire lasers as the workhorse laser of atomic physics labs. Their versatility and prolific use throughout atomic physics in applications such as absorption spectroscopy and laser cooling makes it imperative for incoming students to g...

We investigate theoretically a fiber laser passively mode-locked with nonlinear polarization rotation. A unidirectional ring cavity is considered with a polarizer placed between two sets of a halfwave plate and a quarterwave plate. A master equation is derived and the stability of the continuous and mode-locked solutions is studied. In particular, the effect of the orientation of the four phase...

We develop robust computational methods, referred to as boundary tracking algorithms, that can rapidly determine the existence and stability of pulses in passively mode-locked laser systems over a broad parameter range. Applying the boundary tracking algorithms to the cubic–quintic mode-locking equation, we find a rich dynamical structure. © 2014 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (000.3860...

A compact semiconductor mode-locked laser (MLL) is presented that demonstrates strong passive Q-switched mode-locking over a wide range of drive conditions. The Q-switched frequency is tunable between 1 and 4 GHz for mode-locked pulses widths around 3.5 ps. The maximum ratio of peak to average power of the pulse-train is >120, greatly exceeding that of similarly sized passively MLLs.

Imperfections in the surface of intracavity elements of an optical ring resonator can scatter light from one mode into the counterpropagating mode. The phase-locking of the cavity modes induced by this backscat-tering is a well-known example that notoriously afflicts laser gyroscopes and similar active systems. We experimentally show how backscattering can be circumvented in a unidirectionally ...