Investigation of a diode-pumped Ti:sapphire laser modelocked using carbon nanotubes

Abstract

We report a diode-pumped femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser in which a suspension of single-walled carbon nanotubes spin-coated onto a cavity mirror is the saturable absorber element. Laser performance is presented for single-diode pumping at 462 nm with 51-fs pulses being achieved with an output power of 27 mW. The laser exhibits stable operation with a relative intensity noise of 0.26% and a pulse repetition frequency of 79.24 MHz. Measurements reporting saturable and non-saturable losses each of ∼0.1% illustrate that this saturable absorber element is particularly appropriate for use in a low gain system such as a diode-pumped Ti:sapphire laser.