Non-equilibrium ultrashort pulse generation strategies in VECSELs

Vertical external cavity surface emitting lasers are ideal testbeds for studying nonlinear many-body systems driven far from equilibrium. The classical laser gain picture fails, however, when a high peak intensity optical pulse of duration shorter than the intrinsic carrier scattering time interacts with electrons in the conduction and holes in the valence band, and the non-equilibrium carrier distributions cannot recover during the presence of the exciting pulse. We present the optimization of ultrashort mode-locked pulses in a vertical external cavity surface emitting laser cavity with a saturable absorber mirror by modelling non-equilibrium quantum dynamics of the electron-hole excitations in the semiconductor quantum-well gain and absorber medium via the semiconductor Bloch equations and treating the field propagation at the level of Maxwell's wave equation. We introduce a systematic design that predicts the generation of stable mode-locked pulses of duration less than twenty femtoseconds. This factor of five improvement is of interest for mode-locking and ultrafast semiconductor dynamics applications. (C) 2017 Optical Society of Americ