LD-pumped high-repetition-rate all-solid-state femtosecond lasers (Invited)

Compared with traditional ~100 MHz femtosecond lasers, the mode spacing is larger of GHz femtosecond lasers so that each comb can simply be resolved. Furthermore, the less dense of longitudinal modes results in higher average power. Therefore, it has more important application value in many research fields, such as comb-resolvabled spectroscopy, direct optical frequency comb spectroscopy, optical arbitrary waveform generation and astronomical spectrograph calibration. In this review, the generation schemes of GHz femtosecond pulses and the corresponding technical challenges of GHz-repetition-rate all-solid-state femtosecond lasers pumped by laser diode were introduced in detail firsly. Secondly, the international research progresses of all-solid-state GHz femtosecond lasers based on SESAM passively mode-locking and Kerr-lens mode-locking were summarized. Finally, the application value and research object of our group in all-solid-state GHz-repetition-rate femtosecond lasers were forcasted based on our preliminary research results.