(Image: KMLabs)

After years of development, KMLabs has commercially introduced the first titanium: sapphire (Ti: sapphire) ultrafast laser oscillator directly pumped with blue-emitting laser diodes. Conventionally, Ti: sapphire lasers have been pumped with 532 nm (green) emitting frequency-doubled neodymium: YAG (Nd: YAG) lasers, or, more recently, smaller frequency-doubled vanadate lasers. Using direct diode pumping instead greatly reduces the cost of the Ti: sapphire laser oscillator system. In fact, KMLabs has found that it is now possible to pump a Ti: sapphire laser with a single inexpensive 4 W blue laser diode.
 


The new diode-pumped Ti:Sapphire laser, which KMLabs calls the Stryde Blue, is, according to the company, a "fully engineered and integrated commercial source based on a single rugged optomechanical platform, and eliminates the need for costly frequency-doubled vanadate pump lasers."

Stryde Blue spectrum and pulse duration (from product brochure)

According to KMLabs, the Stryde Blue characteristics include:

--pumped by a single integrated laser diode
--demonstrated long-term stability >500 hours of <0.5% RMS
--computer-controlled tuning of center wavelength and spectral bandwidth
--sub-15 fs pulses
--well-suited for standalone experiments, seeding of ultrafast laser amplifiers, or teaching labs
--beam quality M2 typically < 1.2
--150 mW avg. output power
--2 nJ pulse energy
--repetition rate 78 MHz

Applications include amplifier seeding, materials research, femtochemistry, spectroscopy, terahertz generation, ultrafast imaging, two-photon polymerization, and pump-probe experiments.