Abstract
Optical pulses with durations of a few tens of femtoseconds are used to drive applications ranging from attoscience to metrology1, but femtosecond lasers remain bulky and expensive items based on vibronic crystal or ytterbium-doped silica fibre gain media. Although, in principle, bandgap-engineered quantum-confined semiconductor materials have significant advantages in terms of their gain bandwidth and spectral versatility, semiconductor lasers have not, to date, been capable of generating comparably short pulses. Here, we describe an optically pumped InGaAs/GaAs quantum-well laser that is passively mode-locked using an intracavity semiconductor saturable absorber mirror2 that emits 60-fs pulses at 1,037 nm with an optical spectrum bandwidth of 20 nm (full-width at half-maximum). In this laser, fast optical Stark self-absorption modulation and strong gain saturation combine to shape pulses on the timescale of carrier–carrier scattering. The cavity contains a stable group of circulating pulses, regularly spaced at an interval fixed by the time over which the saturated gain recovers.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$209.00 per year
only $17.42 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Keller, U. Recent developments in compact ultrafast lasers. Nature 424, 831–838 (2003).
Keller, U. et al. Semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs) for femtosecond to nanosecond pulse generation in solid-state lasers. IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. 2, 435–453 (1996).
Keller, U. & Tropper, A. C. Passively modelocked surface-emitting semiconductor lasers. Phys. Rep. 429, 67–120 (2006).
Tsuda, S., Knox, W. H., Cundiff, S. T., Jan, W. Y. & Cunningham, J. E. Mode-locking ultrafast solid-state lasers with saturable Bragg reflectors. IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. 2, 454–464 (1996).
Garnache, A. et al. Sub-500-fs soliton-like pulse in a passively mode-locked broadband surface-emitting laser with 100 mW average power. Appl. Phys. Lett. 80, 3892–3894 (2002).
Klopp, P. et al. InGaAs–AlGaAs disc laser generating sub-220-fs pulses and tapered diode amplifier with ultrafast pulse picking, in Advanced Solid-State Photonics, OSA Technical Digest Series, paper ME3 (Optical Society of America, 2009).
Klopp, P. et al. Mode-locked InGaAs–AlGaAs disk laser generating sub-200-fs pulses, pulse picking and amplification by a tapered diode amplifier. Opt. Express 17, 10820–10834 (2009).
Wilcox, K. G. et al. Ultrafast optical Stark mode-locked semiconductor laser. Opt. Lett. 33, 2797–2799 (2008).
Daniell, G. J., Mihoubi, Z., Wilcox, K. G. & Tropper, A. C. Numerical model of the optical Stark effect as a mode-locking mechanism for femtosecond vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting semiconductor lasers. 2008 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics & Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference Vol. 1–9, 919–920 (2008).
Sun, C. K., Golubovic, B., Choi, H. K., Wang, C. A. & Fujimoto, J. G. Femtosecond investigations of spectral hole-burning in semiconductor-lasers. Appl. Phys. Lett. 66, 1650–1652 (1995).
Hall, K. L., Thoen, E. R. & Ippen, E. P. Nonlinear optics in semiconductors II, in Semiconductors and Semimetals, Vol. 59, Ch. 2 (Academic Press, 1999).
Borri, P. et al. Ultrafast gain dynamics in InAs–InGaAs quantum-dot amplifiers. IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 12, 594–596 (2000).
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
A.H.Q. and K.G.W. contributed equally as first authors. A.H.Q. conducted the experiments and analysed the data. K.G.W. designed the samples and conducted the first experiments. V.A. wrote the paper and interpreted the data. Z.M. carried out the modelling, S.E. characterized the wafers, I.F. and D.A.R. provided molecular beam epitaxy growth, and A.C.T. interpreted data, supervised the project and wrote the paper.
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Quarterman, A., Wilcox, K., Apostolopoulos, V. et al. A passively mode-locked external-cavity semiconductor laser emitting 60-fs pulses. Nature Photon 3, 729–731 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2009.216
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2009.216
This article is cited by
-
Temporal solitons in a coherently driven active resonator
Nature Photonics (2021)
-
Ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons
Nature Communications (2020)
-
Dynamics of passively mode-locked lasers with saturable absorber and saturable nonlinearity
Applied Physics B (2020)
-
Femtosecond pulse generation beyond photon lifetime limit in gain-switched semiconductor lasers
Communications Physics (2018)
-
A robust and tuneable mid-infrared optical switch enabled by bulk Dirac fermions
Nature Communications (2017)