Ultrafast pulse generation in a mode-locked Erbium chip waveguide laser.

We report mode-locked ~1550 nm output of transform-limited ~180 fs pulses from a large mode-area (diameter ~50 μm) guided-wave erbium fluorozirconate glass laser. The passively mode-locked oscillator generates pulses with 25 nm bandwidth at 156 MHz repetition rate and peak-power of 260 W. Scalability to higher repetition rate is demonstrated by transform-limited 410 fs pulse output at 1.3 GHz. To understand the origins of the broad spectral output, the laser cavity is simulated by using a numerical solution to the Ginzburg-Landau equation. This paper reports the widest bandwidth and shortest pulses achieved from an ultra-fast laser inscribed waveguide laser.