DIGCO® offered NIST Er:glass for a femtosecond laser solution

Er:Yb:glass is an attractive bulk gain medium because of its emission in the telecommunications C band near 1550 nm. It can be produced in large quantities at low cost with high optical quality, and it can be efficiently pumped with standard 980-nm telecommunications diode lasers. Therefore, it has found a wide range of applications: Er:Yb:glass has been used in high-quality, low-noise, widely tunable single-mode lasers for spectroscopy applications, in compact Q-switched microchip lasers for sensing applications, and in high-power lasers for military applications.In the past few years, Er:Yb:glass lasers have also established their position as pulse generating lasers for next-generation optical networks: some developed passively mode-locked Er:Yb:glass lasers at repetition rates of up to 50 GHz that are extremely simple and compact, yield high-quality pulses with average powers of a few tens of milliwatts, and can be synchronized to an external clock with very low timing jitter.This makes them interesting for applications in transmitters or receivers of telecommunications networks.For increasing bit rates, shorter pulses are required; e.g., pulse durations well below 1 ps are required for a bit rate of 640 Gbits per channel. A reported simple diode-pumped passively mode-locked Er:Yb:glass laser generated transform-limited 1536-nm solitons of 255-fs duration with a repetition rate of 50 MHz and average power of 58 mW.