Moving towards 100 GHz from a passively mode-locked Er:Yb:glass laser at 1.5 μm

This paper presents a system, which allows extending the operation range into the 100-GHz regime. The approach is based on fundamental mode locking i.e. a single pulse is circulating in the laser cavity thus avoiding the instabilities and timing jitter which typically arise from harmonic modelocking. For 100 GHz, this leads to an extremely small optical cavity length of 1.5 mm for a linear standing wave cavity.