Wiggling Temporal Localized States in Passively Mode-Locked Vertical External Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers

Passive-mode locking (PML) is a fascinating phenomenon allowing for the generation of ultrashort optical pulses. Semiconductor lasers are widely used as PML sources and Vertical External-Cavity Surface-Emitting Semiconductor Lasers (VECSELs) are explored in various applications that require stable lasing with high output power and good beam quality. Here, PML can be obtained by closing the external cavity with a semiconductor saturable absorber (SA) mirror (see Fig. 1 (a) ). Operating in the long cavity regime, where the round-trip time is much longer than the semiconductor gain recovery time, the PML pulses become independent and addressable temporal localized states (TLSs) below the lasing threshold [1] (see Fig. 1 (b) ).