1.5: History

1960: First laser, ruby, Maiman [4].

1961: Proposal for Q-switching, Hellwarth [5].

1963: First indications of mode locking in ruby lasers, Guers and Mueller [6],[7], Statz and Tang [8]. on He-Ne lasers.

1964: Activemodelocking (HeNe, Ar, etc.), DiDomenico [9], [10] and Yariv [11].

1966: Passive modelocking with saturable dye absorber in ruby by A. J. Dellaria, Mocker and Collins [12].

1966: Dye laser, F. P. Schäfer, et al. [13].

1968: mode-locking (Q-Switching) of dye-lasers, Schmidt, Schäfer [14].

1972: cw-passive modelocking of dye laser, Ippen, Shank, Dienes [15].

1972: Analytic theories on active modelocking [21, 22].

1974: Sub-ps-pulses, Shank, Ippen [16].

1975: Theories for passive modelocking with slow [1], [24] and fast saturable absorbers [25] predicted hyperbolic secant pulse.

1981: Colliding-pulse mode-locked laser (CPM), [17].

1982: Pulse compression [20].

1984: Soliton Laser, Mollenauer, [26].

1985: Chirped pulse amplification, Strickland and Morou, [27].

1986: Ti:sapphire (solid-state laser), P. F. Moulton [28].

1987: 6 fs at 600 nm, external compression, Fork et al. [18, 19].

1988: Additive Pulse Modelocking (APM),[29, 30, 31].

1991: Kerr-lens modelocking, Spence et al. [32, 33, 34, 35, 36].

1993: Streched pulse laser, Tamura et al [37].

1994: Chirped mirrors, Szipoecs et al. [38, 39]

1997: Double-chirped mirrors, Kaertner et al.[40]

2001: 5 fs, sub-two cycle pulses, octave spanning, Ell at. al.[42]

2001: 250 as by High-Harmonic Generation, Krausz et al.[43]

Figure 1.13: Pulse width of different laser systems by year.. Courtesy of Erich Ippen. Used with permission.

Figure 1.14: Pulse width of Ti:sapphire lasers by year