Broadly tunable self-starting passively mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser with triple strained quantum well saturable Bragg reflector

Summary form only given. Semiconductor saturable-absorber mirrors (SESAM) have been successfully used for passive mode-locking of solid-state lasers. Pulses as short as 65 fs were achieved. One of the key issue for SESAMs is the tuning range. Previous workers tuned the laser either by heating the saturable Bragg reflector (SBR), the use of two identical quantum wells to broaden the band; or the broadened absorption edge of LT-quantum well. In this work, we report a new type of SBR using triple strained-layer quantum wells with separate and sequential absorption peaks as the absorbing layer.