Nd:YAP laser pulse compression by three-stage transient stimulated Brillouin and Raman scattering

Abstract

There is a continuous effort to generate stable, powerful picosecond laser pulses for application in spectroscopy, nonlinear optics and parametric light generation, as well. One of the possible methods is the compression of longer nanosecond laser pulses by stimulated Brillouin and stimulated Raman scattering. The advantages of such a technique, in comparison to the used mode locked picosecond lasers, are as follows: the absence of the active and/or passive mode lockers used to generate a train of picosecond pulses, and the absence of a fast electrooptical shutter used to select a single pulse from a train of pulses. The application of stimulated Brillouin and stimulated Raman scattering permits to generate picosecond pulses in the wavelength regions not covered by mode locked lasers. Of special interest is the wavelength region of 0·8 μm, which may be amplified by the attractive Titanium Sapphire lasers. In this paper we are summarizing our results in theoretical modelling and in real generation of picosecond pulses by means of cascaded stimulated Brillouin and Raman scattering. The models of scattering processes have been investigated. The stable generation of 5, 7, 3 picosecond pulses have been optimized for the wavelengths of 0·8, 0·64 and 0·54 μm, respectively. In all these cases, the pulses exhibited the far field pattern close to Gaussian, with the pulse energy ranging from 0·2 to 1 mJ.