Bulk Er:Yb:glass soliton femtosecond laser

Summary form only given. A bulk solid state Er:glass laser can combine the advantages of existing Er:fiber lasers, i.e. femtosecond pulses, with pulse-width tunability and low phase noise. Moreover, the combination of low-cost glass and pumping-by a relatively low-power diode laser is competitive to other bulk gain materials, e.g. Cr:YAG crystals using a pump power of several Watts, working at the eyesafe and telecommunications wavelength around 1.5 gin. However, the shortest pulses reported for a bulk Er:glass laser were limited to 2.5 ps. To overcome the limitation to the picosecond regime we increased the intracavity self-phase modulation in order to achieve soliton modelocking. This was realized by the insertion of an additional Kerr medium in the focal region of the resonator.