Abstract

Recent successes in flashlamp pumping of Ti: sapphire^1,2 opened new fields of applications to this laser material.³ Flashlamp pumped Ti: sapphire lasers providing more than 2 Joule per pulse are already commercially available.⁴ However, the spectral brightness of these high power oscillators is often not large enough for spectroscopic applications or for efficient frequency conversion. Investigations showed⁵ that the bandwidth and mode profile of the resonator are determined by the large volume of the gain medium and the small diameter of the fundamental Gaussian mode. Commercial ways to achieve large TEM₀₀ volumes with gradient reflectivity mirrors are limited by the broad tuning range of the Ti : sapphire crystal. A commonly used solution to achieve narrow spectral bandwidth and a good mode profile is to seed the laser medium with a high purity oscillator source.

© 1994 IEEE