Abstract

The recent renaissance in solid-state lasers due to diodepumping and new tunable materials has stimulated the development of many new modelocking efforts for an all-solid-state ultrafast technology. Semiconductor saturable absorbers can be custom designed and cover bandgaps from the visible to the infrared. However, they have significant optical loss, low saturation intensity and low damage threshold. This is not easily compatible with rare earth and transition metal lasers which require a low-loss "fast" saturable absorber. One possible solution is resonant passive modelocking (RPM).