Phase-stabilization of the carrier-envelope-offset frequency of a SESAM modelocked thin disk laser.

We phase-stabilized the carrier-envelope-offset (CEO) frequency of a SESAM modelocked Yb:CaGdAlO₄ (CALGO) thin disk laser (TDL) generating 90-fs pulses at a center wavelength of 1051.6 nm and a repetition rate of 65 MHz. By launching only 2% of its output power into a photonic crystal fiber, we generated a coherent octave-spanning supercontinuum spectrum. Using a standard f-to-2f interferometer for CEO detection, we measured CEO beats with 33 dB signal-to-noise ratio in 100 kHz resolution bandwidth. We achieved a tight lock of the CEO frequency at 26.18 MHz by active feedback to the pump current. The residual in-loop integrated phase noise is 120 mrad (1 Hz-1 MHz). This is, to our knowledge, the first CEO-stabilized SESAM modelocked TDL. Our results show that a reliable lock of the CEO frequency can be achieved using standard techniques in spite of the strongly spatially multimode pumping scheme of TDLs. This opens the door towards fully-stabilized low-noise frequency combs with hundreds of watts of average power from table-top SESAM modelocked thin disk oscillators.