888 nm pumped 1342 nm Nd:YVO4 oscillator Kerr-lens mode-locked using cascaded second-order nonlinearities

We report on a parametric Kerr-lens mode-locked 888 nm pumped Nd:YVO4 1342 nm oscillator using cascaded second-order nonlinearities in LBO. Stable ps-pulse-operation was achieved. For an output coupling of T=25% high average output power of 6.5 W, emitting Fourier-limited pulses with a duration of 10 ps was reached. By changing the output coupling to T=10%, we achieved much shorter pulses with a pulse duration of 4 ps for less lower average power of 4.8 W. The beam was diffraction limited with an M 2 parameter better than <1.05.