Femtosecond VECSEL with tunable multi-gigahertz repetition rate

We present a femtosecond vertical external cavity surface emitting laser (VECSEL) that is continuously tunable in repetition rate from 6.5 GHz up to 11.3 GHz. The use of a low-saturation fluence semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) enables stable cw modelocking with a simple cavity design, for which the laser mode area on SESAM and VECSEL are similar and do not significantly change for a variation in cavity length. Without any realignment of the cavity for the full tuning range, the pulse duration remained nearly constant around 625 fs with less than 3.5% standard deviation. The center wavelength only changed +/-0.2 nm around 963.8 nm, while the output power was 169 mW with less than 6% standard deviation. Such a tunable repetition rate is interesting for various metrology applications such as optical sampling by laser cavity tuning (OSCAT). (C) 2011 Optical Society of America