Abstract

Pulse-slicing from a cw laser output followed by high gain amplification can produce quasi-cw pulses at power levels well in excess of those available from large frame cw lasers. Mode-locked pulse trains with an envelope of 10µs duration and at 2kHz repetition rate are amplified by a factor of 20 to give 5Watts of envelope average power. These power levels allow efficient single-pass frequency doubling and subsequent pumping of a lithium triborate optical parametric oscillator.

© 1996 Optical Society of America