All-Solid-State Tunable Diode-Pumped Ultrafast Laser Oscillators and Amplifiers for Real-World Applications Including Medical Imaging

The development of Kerr Lens mode-locked (KLM) solid-state lasers [1, 2] has demonstrated the potential for convenient user friendly ultrafast laser systems which may be commercialised and applied in a wide range of scientific and technological areas. Self-starting KLM has recently been shown to be straightforward in Ti: sapphire lasers [3] and may be extended to any other solid-state laser medium to yield a relatively simple picosecond or femtosecond laser with no active components to increase the complexity of the system and no resonant saturable absorbers to compromise the tunability.