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Updated: May 14, 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
4.35 kW peak power femtosecond pulse mode-locked VECSEL for supercontinuum generation
Keith G Wilcox1, Anne C Tropper, Harvey E Beere
1School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK. K.G.Wilcox@soton.ac.uk
Abstract:
We report a passively mode-locked vertical external cavity surface emitting laser (VECSEL) producing 400 fs pulses with 4.35 kW peak power. The average output power was 3.3 W and the VECSEL had a repetition rate of 1.67 GHz at a center wavelength of 1013 nm. A near-antiresonant, substrate-removed, 10 quantum well (QW) gain structure designed to enable femtosecond pulse operation is used. A SESAM which uses fast carrier recombination at the semiconductor surface and the optical Stark effect enables passive mode-locking. When 1 W of the VECSEL output is launched into a 2 m long photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with a 2.2 µm core, a supercontinuum spanning 175 nm, with average power 0.5 W is produced.
