350-W Average-Power SESAM-Modelocked Ultrafast Thin-Disk Laser

Ultrafast lasers are ubiquitous in industry and science. Due to the intense research in this field, the output power available from these sources saw impressive developments over the last two decades. Thin-disk lasers (TDLs) have been one of the major technologies enabling this revolution in high power laser sources. TDL oscillators currently achieve the highest output power and pulse energy of any ultrafast laser technology [1, 2]. Here, we present a new record average-output-power result for any modelocked oscillator. We demonstrate 350 W with 940-fs pulses at the output of an Yb:YAG thin-disk oscillator modelocked with a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) (Fig. 1a).