Direct pumping of ultrashort Ti:sapphire lasers by a frequency doubled diode laser

A simple and robust diode laser system emitting 1.28 W of green light suitable for pumping an ultrafast Ti:sapphire laser is presented. To classify our results, the diode laser is compared to a standard, commercially available diode pumped solid-state (DPSS) laser system pumping the same oscillator. When using our diode laser system, the optical conversion efficiencies from green to near-infrared light reduces to 75 % of the values achieved with the commercial pump laser. Despite this reduction the overall efficiency of the Ti:sapphire laser is still increased by a factor >; 2 due to the superior electro-optical efficiency of the diode laser. Autocorrelation measurements show that pulse widths of less than 20 fs can be expected with an average power of 52 mW when using our laser. These results indicate the high potential of direct diode laser pumped Ti:sapphire lasers to be used in applications like retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) or pumping of photonic crystal fibers for CARS (coherent anti-stokes Raman spectroscopy) microscopy.