Index to volume 20 (1988)

Abstract

The chapter presents a descriptive review of the recent advances up to about mid-1980 in the development of high-power tunable laser devices, to consider their future potential and to discuss possible new developments. This chapter deals with the recent advances in dye laser technology in five categories: flashlamp-pumped, laser-pumped (pulsed and cw), vapor phase, and injection-locked dye lasers. The discussion of the relevant basic physics and chemistry is extremely brief. A brief representative list of dye laser energies, average powers, and tuning ranges for the five categories discussed is given in one of the tables. Tunable psec and subpsec pulses have been generated in mode-locked sources including flashlamp-pumped dye lasers, cw dye lasers, excimer lasers, color center lasers, and nonlinear frequency-conversion devices with excitation from tunable psec sources. One of the tables of the chapter gives some recent representative psec generators along with their tuning ranges, pulse energies and powers, pulse repetition rates, and average powers. In addition to the laser sources discussed, pulsed and modelocked parametric oscillators pumped by mode-locked lasers have also produced psec pulses. Details of some of the latest developments of color center lasers are described. Other tunable sources have been derived from dye lasers using nonlinear effects in various materials. The chapter presents nonlinear coherent sources: harmonic generation in pulsed dye laser; intracavity frequency-doubled cw dye lasers; optical parametric oscillators and amplifiers; sum-frequency mixing; and Raman generation. Other high-power tunable lasers are blue-green lasers, Lyman-α sources and metal-doped solid state lasers.