Generation of 7-fs laser pulse directly from a compact Ti:sapphire laser with chirped mirrors

A compact femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser resonator consisting of three chirped mirrors and one output coupler was designed. By accurately balancing the intracavity dispersions between Ti:sapphire crystal, air and chirped mirrors, we directly generated the laser pulse shorter than 7 fs at the average power of 340 mW with 3.1 W pump. The repetition rate of the laser oscillator is 173 MHz at the centre wavelength of 791 nm, and the ultrabroaden spectrum covers from 600 nm to 1000 nm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the simplest laser resonator capable of generating sub-10 fs laser pulse.