Self-starting soliton modelocked Ti-sapphire laserusing athin semiconductor saturable absorber

Abstract
Using a 15 nm-thick antireflection-coated GaAs absorber layer on an AlGaAs/AlAs Bragg mirror as a nonlinear reflector, we achieved self-starting passive modelocking of a Ti-sapphire laser with 34 fs pulses without Kerr lens modelocking.