High Energy Visible And UV Picosecond Pulses From A Cavity Dumped Dye Laser, Pumped By A C.W. Mode Locked And Q-Switched Nd:YAG Laser

Abstract

We report the design of a dye laser capable of producing 20 picosecond pulses at repetition rates of up to lk Hz with energies of up to 50 μJ. The problems associated with the design of this laser will be discussed. In recent years the synchronously pumped dye laser has evolved into one of the most widely used sources of tunable picosecond and sub-picosecond pulses. The typical output of these systems is at most a few tens of nanojoules. If higher energy is required the output is amplified. Recently Wisoff et all reported the development of a dye laser designed to be pumped by the output of a mode locked and Q-switched Nd:YAG laser that produced pulses from 10 -30 picoseconds duration at repetition rates of 6-10 Hz. The laser described in this paper has been designed to use an acousto-optic cavity dumper. Figure 1 shows the optical layout of the laser. A telescope configuration (M 2 and M 3 ) allows selection of the appropriate beam waist sizes in the dye cell and acousto-optic Bragg cell. The prism beam expander is used to select the spot size at the grating thereby allowing the user to generate a Fourier transform pulse with given duration.