Abstract

The colliding pulse mode-locking (CPM) dye laser has established itself as the workhorse of femtosecond optics and spectroscopy owing to the ease of generating optical pulses of <100-fs duration and its incredible stability. Judging by the experimental work done on and with CPM lasers, it seems impossible to improve this laser further. However, we show that a significant source of amplitude noise in the CPM laser has so far been overlooked and can be entirely eliminated by simply inserting a single frequency etalon in the cavity of the (argon-ion) pump laser.

© 1990 Optical Society of America