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Updated: Jun 1, 2026
Low-cost Custom Fabrication and Mode-locked Operation of an All-normal-dispersion Femtosecond Fiber Laser for Multiphoton Microscopy
Published on: November 22, 2019
Low noise chirped pulse mode-locked laser using an intra-cavity Fabry-Pérot etalon
Dimitrios Mandridis1, Charles Williams, Ibrahim Ozdur
1CREOL, The College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Boulevard, Orlando, Florida 32816, USA. dimitrismandridis@gmail.com
Abstract:
This work presents an extensive investigation of the performance characteristics of a semiconductor-based Theta cavity design laser with an intra-cavity Fabry-Pérot etalon operating at 100 MHz repetition rate. The Theta laser being an external cavity harmonically mode-locked semiconductor laser exhibits supermode noise that impairs its performance. A fiberized Fabry-Pérot periodic filter inserted within the Theta laser cavity mitigates the contribution of the supermode noise to the pulse-to-pulse energy variance by 20 times. The laser has both a compressed output with picosecond pulse duration and a uniform intensity quasi-CW linearly chirped pulse output with 10 nm bandwidth. Long-term stability is attained by referencing the cavity length to the etalon using an intra-cavity Hänsch-Couillaud locking scheme.
