Titanium-Sapphire Laser for MECSEL Spectral Gain Characterization

Abstract

This thesis presents the design and building process of a tunable continuous wave titanium-sapphire laser and its utilization for spectral gain measurements of a semiconductor membrane external-cavity surface-emitting laser (MECSEL) emitting in the 800 nm region. Four different continuous wave titanium-sapphire cavities (linear, V, Z and bowtie) are designed and built. The titanium-sapphire laser is used as a tunable probe laser to scan across the sample’s expected spectral gain region. For the spectral gain measurements, an active mirror reflectance (AMR) method has already been proven to successfully measure spectral gain for vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VECSELs). In this work, this method is slightly modified and then used to measure the spectral gain similarly for MECSELs.