Ultrafast pulse generation in a mode-locked Erbium chip waveguide laser

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates ultrafast, transform-limited pulses at 1550 nm from a large mode-area erbium waveguide laser, achieving record bandwidth and pulse duration, with insights from numerical cavity simulations.

Contribution

It reports the first ultrafast, broad bandwidth, transform-limited pulses from an inscribed waveguide laser with detailed numerical analysis of the spectral origins.

Findings

Generated 180 fs pulses at 156 MHz with 25 nm bandwidth.

Achieved 410 fs pulses at 1.3 GHz with high peak power.

Provided numerical simulation of laser cavity dynamics.

Abstract

We report mode-locked ~1550 nm output of transform-limited ~180 fs pulses from a large mode-area (diameter ~ 50 {\mu}m) guided-wave erbium fluorozirconate glass laser. The passively mode-locked oscillator generates pulses with 25 nm bandwidth at 156 MHz repetition rate and peak-power of 260 W. Scalability to higher repetition rate is demonstrated by transform-limited 410 fs pulse output at 1.3 GHz. To understand the origins of the broad spectral output, the laser cavity is simulated by using a numerical solution to the Ginzburg-Landau equation. This paper reports the widest bandwidth and shortest pulses achieved from an ultra-fast laser inscribed waveguide laser.