Continuous repetition rate tuning from 960 MHz to 1.72 GHz of a sub-300 femtosecond mode-locked semiconductor disk laser

Vertical External Cavity Surface Emitting semiconductor Lasers rely on Semiconductor Saturable Absorbing Mirrors for mode-locking, allowing laser cavities to be designed far from stability limits. We have harnessed this feature to study repetition rate tunability. The cavity element separations were determined by a coded cavity design protocol based on cavity round trip matrix calculations. We produced a sub-300-fs near transform-limited pulse train with a repetition rate of 0.96 MHz-1.72 GHz, at 1035 nm and an average power of 50 mW.