Broadband saturable absorber for 10-fs pulse generation

We demonstrate the fabrication of a broadband saturable absorber with a silver bottom mirror. The reflectivity bandwidth of the absorber shows the potential for generating sub-10-fs pulses. With a Ti:sapphire laser we obtained self-starting Kerr-lens mode-locked pulses as short as 10 fs at the cavity stability limit and selfstarting soliton mode-locked pulses of 16 fs over the full cavity stability regime.