Abstract

Notoriously unreliable performance of pulsed purely passively mode-locked lasers can be significantly improved with simultaneous active and passive mode locking. In addition to the much lower failure rate and the higher energy stability that has been demonstrated previously¹ there are many other properties of the laser which are significantly improved. A key attractive feature of active and passive mode locking is the fact that the operating parameters of the laser can be varied over a rather wide range, permitting certain properties of interest to be selectively optimized.

© 1986 Optical Society of America