250 mW, 1.5 microm monolithic passively mode-locked slab-coupled optical waveguide laser

We report the demonstration of a 1.5 microm InGaAsP mode-locked slab-coupled optical waveguide laser (SCOWL) producing 10 ps pulses with energies of 58 pJ and average output powers of 250 mW at a repetition rate of 4.29 GHz. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first passively mode-locked slab-coupled optical waveguide laser. The large mode and low confinement factor of the SCOWL architecture allows the realization of monolithic mode-locked lasers with high output power and pulse energy. The laser output is nearly diffraction limited with M2 values less than 1.2 in both directions.