Kerr Lens Mode Locking
Author: the photonics expert Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta
Acronym: KLM
Definition: a technique for mode locking a laser, exploiting nonlinear self-focusing
More general term: passive mode locking
Categories: light pulses, methods
DOI: 10.61835/pus Cite the article: BibTex plain textHTML Link to this page LinkedIn
Kerr lens mode locking is a technique of passive mode locking a laser, using an artificial saturable absorber based on Kerr lensing in the gain medium. The latter effect causes a reduction in the beam size for high optical intensities. Via two different mechanisms, this can effectively act like a fast saturable absorber:
- In the case of hard aperture KLM, the Kerr lens reduces the optical losses at an aperture which the beam must pass in each resonator round trip.
- In the case of soft aperture KLM, the Kerr lens leads to a better overlap of laser and pump beam, and thus to a higher gain for the peak of the pulse. That increase of gain has a similar effect as a decrease of losses; both effects increase the net round-trip gain.
- A modified version of the second method exploits nonlinear self-focusing in a separate passive Kerr medium [20]. The advantage of that approach is that the requirements on the radiance (brightness) of the pump beam are then much lower. In some cases, that allows one to realize lasers with substantially higher average output power [23].
The article on passive mode locking explains how a saturable absorber leads to mode locking.
KLM is sometimes called self mode locking because it does not require a visible saturable absorber device. Its first observation [1], where that term was introduced, has not yet been explained with the influence of nonlinear focusing based on the Kerr effect; that was provided by others shortly after that first report [2].
Kerr lens mode locking has enabled the generation of the shortest pulses with durations down to ≈ 5 fs in Ti:sapphire lasers. Its main advantages are the following:
- Its strength lies in the very fast response, suitable for generating the shortest light pulses.
- No special saturable absorber medium is required; the technique can thus be applied in different spectral regions without special components.
However, there are also some disadvantages:
- One generally needs to operate the laser close to a stability limit of its resonator because otherwise the Kerr lensing effect is too weak. As a consequence, long-term stable operation is difficult to achieve, and the resonator design is a difficult task.
- Reliable self-starting mode locking is often not achieved. That is a negative consequence of the fast absorber response; slow absorbers are better in terms of self-starting. Often such lasers start in a noisy operation mode, not producing ultrashort pulses, after being turned on, and switch to mode-locked operation only after an external trigger, e.g. when a resonator mirror is manually tapped in order to stimulate power fluctuations.
- Accurate modeling is different due to the complicated spatio–temporal dynamics and the uncertainties related to how close one is to the resonator's stability limit. Simplified models can at least roughly predict the achieved modulation depth and saturation power, and thus assist in finding a suitable resonator design. However, accurate predictions are difficult.
- Depending on the application, it may also be disturbing that the laser beam radius may change during the pulse.
- The power conversion efficiency of KLM lasers is often relatively low, e.g. due to non-ideal overlap between laser and pump beam and critical resonator alignment. However, quite high efficiency has been achieved in some cases [29].
A modified kind of KLM has been applied to vertical external-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VECSELs) [17]. Their gain medium does not exhibit a true Kerr nonlinearity, but a similar effect based on gain saturation and the dependence of refractive index on the carrier density. This typically leads to a negative index change due to gain saturation, but not with an index change in proportion to the momentary optical intensity.
A possible alternative to KLM is passive mode locking with a real saturable absorber, e.g. with a SESAM. It is also possible to combine KLM and a SESAM with particularly broad reflection bandwidth to achieve self-starting mode locking and very short pulses; this is sometimes called SESAM-assisted Kerr lens mode locking.
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