Integrated optics dissipative soliton mode-locked laser on glass

Mode-lock lasers have been studied a lot in the past years for producing pulses as short as possible. These devices have mostly been realized in bulk optics and they are consequently cumbersome and sensitive to vibrations. There are only a few studies on integrated optics mode-lock lasers, though this technology is very promising because of its stability, compactness and the possibility to integrate several functions on a single chip. In this paper, we present an ion-exchange passively mode-locked laser in dissipative soliton operation. One of the key characteristics of this structure is its mechanical stability. Indeed, no bulk optics is needed because the saturable absorber is hybridized on the top of the waveguide in order to interact with the evanescent part of the guided mode. Indeed, the device that has been obtained is composed of an ion-exchanged single mode waveguide realized in a Neodymium doped phosphate glass. The laser feedback is produced by a Fabry-Perot cavity realized with two multilayers dielectric mirrors stuck on the waveguides facets. We implemented a bis(4-dimethylaminodithiobenzil)nickel (BDN) dye included in a cellulose acetate thick film, which presents a saturable absorber behaviour around 1.06 mu m. With this structure, pulses with repetition rates of 3.3 GHz and a single mode output have been measured. Moreover, the use of an autocorrelation set-up allowed us measuring picosecond pulse durations.