Design criteria and operating characteristics of a single-mode pulsed dye laser

Abstract

We have designed and tested a pulsed single-mode dye laser for spectroscopy experiments. The dye laser is pumped by a 6 kHz copper vapor laser to produce up to 230 mW average power at over 5% efficiency in a nearly diffraction limited beam. The dye laser pulse closely resembles the 30 ns pump pulse. Using an electronic servo loop, the 60 MHz wide line can be scanned, without mode hopping, through the 16 GHz permitted by the travel on the piezo driven mirror mount.