Advances in commercial, mode-locked vertical external cavity surface emitting lasers

In launching the Dragonfly, M Squared Lasers has successfully commercialized recent advances in mode-locked vertical external cavity surface emitting laser technologies operating between 920 nm – 1050 nm. This paper will describe the latest advances in the development of a new generation of Dragonfly lasers. The improved system has been engineered to utilise low-cost semiconductor gain media and integrated diode pumping, whilst exhibiting minimal footprint, diffraction limited beam quality and low intrinsic noise. Early experiments have resulted in pulses with 540mW of average output power and 150fs of duration at 200MHz pulse repetition frequency.