Direct generation of 81 nJ pulses and external compression to a subpicosecond regime with a 4.9 MHz chirped-pulse multipass-cavity Cr⁴⁺:forsterite oscillator

Abstract

We report direct generation of 81 nJ chirped pulses from a room-temperature, Kerr lens mode-locked Cr4+:forsterite oscillator operating at 1258nm. To increase the pulse energy, the pulse repetition rate of the short x-type resonator was lowered from 143 to 4.9 MHz by the addition of a q-preserving multipass cavity, which provided an additional effective optical path length of 59.4m. The duration of the chirped pulses was around 5.5 ps with a spectral width of 21nm. The pulses were externally compressed to 607 fs by using a diffraction grating pair. To our knowledge, this is the highest reported pulse energy directly generated from a room-temperature mode-locked Cr4+:forsterite laser. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America