Power-scalable 1.57µm mode-locked semiconductor disk laser using wafer fusion

We report the first (to our knowledge) wafer-fused high-power passively mode-locked semiconductor disk laser operating at 1.57 mu m wavelength. An InP-based active medium was fused with GaAs/AlGaAs distributed Bragg reflector on a 2 inch wafer level, resulting in an integrated monolithic gain mirror. An intracavity wedged diamond heat-spreader capillary bonded to the gain chip provides efficient heat removal from the gain structure without disturbing the spectrum of the mode-locked laser. The laser produces over 0.6 W of average output power at 15 C with 16 ps pulse width. The total output power accounting for all output beams emerging from the cavity was 0.86 W. The results reveal an essential advantage of wafer fusion processing of disparate materials over monolithically grown InP-based gain structures and demonstrate the high potential of this technique for power scaling of long-wavelength semiconductor disk lasers. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America