Abstract

Recently the manufacture of highly dispersive mirrors (HDMs) with negative group delay dispersion (GDD) in excess of −1300 fs² per bounce was reported [1], surpassing the dispersion delivered by common chirped mirrors by more than an order of magnitude over a considerable bandwidth. Here we demonstrate the intracavity applicability of these novel HDMs in Ti:sapphire oscillators for the first time, as well as the unique possibility of compensating a substantial amount of material dispersion in the cavity (40 mm fused silica) with a single mirror bounce. As a proof-of-principle study we realized three substantially different femtosecond oscillator configurations with the help of these HDMs and achieved close-to-transform-limited operation in each, with pulse durations ranging from 50 to 110 fs.

© 2009 IEEE