Clipped name for titanium-doped sapphire, a gain medium tunable from about 650 to 1100 nm with gain bandwidth wide enough for pulses under 10 fs. It is pumped in the green, usually by a frequency-doubled solid-state laser, and is the standard medium for femtosecond oscillators around 800 nm and for chirped pulse amplifiers. Lab people speak of the Ti:sapph as if it were a colleague.
Ti:sapph dropped out of mode lock overnight, I'll kick it and check the spectrum before the users show up.
Also heard as
- Ti:sapphire
- Ti:Al2O3
- tisaph
Related terms
Gain medium
The material inside a laser or amplifier that amplifies light once it is pumped: a crystal, glass, gas, semiconductor or doped fiber.
Mode locking
Fixing the phases of many longitudinal modes so they add up into a train of ultrashort pulses.
Kick
To start a Kerr-lens mode-locked laser by briefly disturbing the cavity so a pulse can form.
Femto
Clipped form of femtosecond, for lasers and pulses lasting from a few to a few hundred quadrillionths of a second.
CPA
Chirped Pulse Amplification: stretching a short pulse before amplifying it, then recompressing it afterwards.