Abstract
Ultrafast lasers, which generate optical pulses in the picosecond and femtosecond range, have progressed over the past decade from complicated and specialized laboratory systems to compact, reliable instruments. Semiconductor lasers for optical pumping and fast optical saturable absorbers, based on either semiconductor devices or the optical nonlinear Kerr effect, have dramatically improved these lasers and opened up new frontiers for applications with extremely short temporal resolution (much smaller than 10 fs), extremely high peak optical intensities (greater than 10 TW/cm2) and extremely fast pulse repetition rates (greater than 100 GHz).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge many important contributions from my graduate students, post-docs and collaborators. I would like to mention Rüdiger Paschotta, Günter Steinmeyer, Franz Kärtner, Markus Haiml who have been senior researchers and project leaders in my group at different times during the last 10 years and Kurt Weingarten, Gabriel Spühler and Lukas Krainer from GigaTera Inc. on the most recent work on high pulse repetition rate lasers. This work has been supported by ETH, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) and the Swiss Technology and Innovation Foundation (KTI).
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Keller, U. Recent developments in compact ultrafast lasers. Nature 424, 831–838 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01938
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01938
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