Prospects of multi-GHz femtosecond operation of a diode-pumped Cr/sup 4+/:YAG laser

In this paper we investigate the possibility of the stable CW mode locking of a Cr:YAG microchip laser with the InGaAs/lnP quantum-well SESAM. The integrated design does not leave many control parameters and our analysis is aimed at optimization of the SESAM's relaxation kinetics, using the numerical model. We analyze the complete temporal dynamics of the two-element micro-chip oscillator with 0.5 cm cavity, 1% output coupler and 100 /spl mu/m beam radius. It was found that, in contrast to the oscillators with /spl sim/100 MHz pulse repetition rate, the presence of the slow loss relaxation component is necessary for the pulse stabilization.