Ultrashort pulse generation from a passively mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser based system

The detailed characteristics of a passively mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser using saturable absorbers are described. This laser can stably generate nearly transform-limited sub-100-fs pulses around 780 nm. Combining this oscillator and a double-pass Ti:sapphire amplifier pumped by a CW Q-switched YAG laser (3 kHz) allows fiber-grating pulse compression down to 14 fs.<
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