Abstract

Recently, pulses of sub-100 fs duration which are widely tunable in the near-infrared have become available on the basis of Ti:sapphire lasers by using different mode-locking techniques /1/. To date, practically in all experimental realizations gas or solid-state CW lasers were used as a pump source. Earlier attemptes to use nonstationary time-limited trains of conventional pulsed mode-locked solid-state lasers for synchronous pumping of Ti:sapphire laser were not successful. This is primarily because of the low gain modulation (less than 1%) owing to the long upper-state lifetime of the gain medium, as compare to that of the dye lasers. From the other hand the synchronous pumping of Ti:sapphire by cw mode-locked lasers is effective to produce picosecond seed pulses for Kerr lens mode-locking and generation of femtosecond pulses /2/.

© 1996 IEEE