Apparatus include a mode-locked laser cavity configured to produce a mode-locked output beam, wherein the laser cavity includes a gain medium situated in the laser cavity and an intracavity optical coating filter situated in the laser cavity to receive an intracavity beam, wherein the intracavity optical coating filter has an attenuation profile configured to suppress laser oscillation over a selected portion of the gain bandwidth of the gain medium and to increase a bandwidth of the mode-locked output beam based on the suppression. Related optical coatings are disclosed. Methods of arranging coatings and reducing pulse duration are also disclosed.

Apparatus for and method of aligning optical components such as mirrors to facilitate proper beam alignment using an image integration optical system is used to integrate images from multiple optical features such as from both left mirror bank and right mirror bank to present the images simultaneously to the camera system. A fluorescent material may be used to render a beam footprint visible and the relative positions of the footprint and an alignment feature may be used to align the optical feature.

A spectral feature selection apparatus includes a dispersive optical element arranged to interact with a pulsed light beam; three or more refractive optical elements arranged in a path of the pulsed light beam between the dispersive optical element and a pulsed optical source; and one or more actuation systems, each actuation system associated with a refractive optical element and configured to rotate the associated refractive optical element to thereby adjust a spectral feature of the pulsed light beam. At least one of the actuation systems is a rapid actuation system that includes a rapid actuator configured to rotate its associated refractive optical element about a rotation axis. The rapid actuator includes a rotary stepper motor having a rotation shaft that rotates about a shaft axis that is parallel with the rotation axis of the associated refractive optical element.

An all-fiber configuration system and method for generating temporally coherent supercontinuum pulsed emission are provided. The system includes a sequential structure of all-fiber sections including: a fiber laser seed source to produce a seed pulse with given optical properties; a stretching section including an optical fiber to temporally stretch the seed pulse; an amplification section including an active optical fiber, doped with a rare earth element, to amplify the stretched pulse by progressively stimulating radiation of active ions of the doped active optical fiber; a compressing section to temporally compress the amplified pulse; and a spectrum broadening section including an ANDi microstructured fiber that spectrally broadens the compressed pulse by a nonlinear effect of Self Phase Modulation (SPM) while maintaining the temporal coherence of the pulse.

A degenerate four-wave mixing (DFWM) squeezed light apparatus includes one or more pump beams, a probe beam, a vapor cell, a repump beam, and a detector. The one or more pump beams includes an input power of no greater than about 150 mW. The vapor cell includes an atomic vapor configured to interact with overlapped pump and probe beams to generate an amplified probe beam and a conjugate beam. The repump beam is configured to optically pump the atomic vapor to a ground state and decrease atomic decoherence of the atomic vapor. The detector is configured to measure squeezing due to quantum correlations between the amplified probe beam and the conjugate beam. The one or more pump beams, the probe beam, and the repump beam are configured to generate two-mode squeezed light by DFWM with squeezing of at least 3 dB below shot noise.

A beam generating device includes a semiconductor substrate, having an optical passband. A first array of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) is formed on a first face of the semiconductor substrate and are configured to emit respective laser beams through the substrate at a wavelength within the passband. A second array of microlenses is formed on a second face of the semiconductor substrate in respective alignment with the VCSELs so as to transmit the laser beams generated by the VCSELs. The VCSELs are configured to be driven to emit the laser beams in predefined groups in order to change a characteristic of the laser beams.

A laser system having a multi-pass amplifier system which includes at least one seed source configured to output at least one seed signal having a seed signal wavelength, at least one pump source configured to output at least one pump signal, at least one multi-pass amplifier system in communication with the seed source and having at least one gain media, a first mirror, and at least a second mirror therein, the gain media device positioned between the first mirror and second mirror and configured to output at least one amplifier output signal having an output wavelength range, the first mirror and second mirror may be configured to reflect the amplifier output signal within the output wavelength range, and at least one optical system may be in communication with the amplifier system and configured to receive the amplifier output signal and output an output signal within the output wavelength range.

The disclosure provides a dispersion management method and apparatus based on non-periodic spectral phase jumps. Precise dispersion is provided by virtue of non-periodic spectral phase jumps, the dispersion can be tuned freely with engineering of the phase jump. A device based on non-periodic spectral phase jump also has a wide working bandwidth and could promote the development of ultrafast optics. The method includes: spatially separating a light pulse with different frequency components, and meanwhile, making the light pulse with the different frequency components propagate in parallel; enabling the light pulse with the different frequency components and propagating in parallel to be incident on a non-periodic phase jump device to obtain non-periodic spectral phase jumps, forming a phase grating effect to obtain two ±1-order diffracted pulses having opposite group delays, and introducing frequency dependent relative delay for the different spectral components in the two diffracted pulses.

In various embodiments, multiple laser emitters are arranged in one or more linear stacks and emit beams to one or more linear stacks of interleaving mirrors. The interleaving mirrors direct the beams to a shared exit point, thereby forming an output beam stack. The optical distances traversed by each beam from its emitter to the shared exit point are all equal to each other.

The invention relates to a laser device comprising a laser source (1), which is configured to emit pulsed laser radiation (2) with a spectrum in the form of a frequency comb having a plurality of equidistant spectral lines, an optical modulator (3), which is configured to shift the frequency of the laser radiation (2), and a control unit (10), which is configured to control the modulator (3) by means of a control signal (6). It is the object of the present invention to demonstrate an improved way, compared to the prior art, of generating an optical frequency comb that is stabilized in terms of the CEO frequency, in which the CE phase is also adjustable. To this end, the invention proposes that the laser radiation (2) emitted by the laser source (1) is stabilized in terms of the carrier-envelope frequency. Furthermore, the invention relates to a method of generating an optical frequency comb.