High-power 10-GHz self-mode-locked Nd:LuVO4 laser

We report on a high-power diode-end-pumped self-mode-locked Nd:LuVO 4 laser with the pulse repetition rate up to 9.52 GHz for the first time. The large third-order nonlinearity of the Nd:LuVO 4 crystal is exploited to efficiently achieve a fairly stable self-mode-locked operation without any additional components. The detailed characteristics of the compact efficient self-mode-locked laser are experimentally investigated and theoretically analyzed. With the incident pump power of 2.6 W, the average output power up to 0.54 W is generated with the pulse width of 7.9 ps at the pulse repetition rate of 9.52 GHz.