Patent ID: 7555023

Claim:
A laser system generating self-starting few cycle laser pulses or widely tunable laser pulses comprising: a modelocked pump source that provides a pulsed pump signal; a gain medium that receives said pulsed pump signal; and a resonator structure that includes the gain medium and a plurality of mirrors including wedges and plates, said resonator structure defines a laser operated in a CW-modelocked regime generating few-cycle laser pulses having a duration less then 10 fs, wherein the length of said resonator structure is controlled by an optical coupler being mounted on a piezo controlled mirror mount and includes a broadband optics for octave-spanning spectra, the total intracavity dispersion of said resonator is changed by moving or completely removing one or more wedges and a plate so as to access different pulse duration regimes and observe reliable self-starting behavior for CW-modelocked pulses down to 6 fs.