Abstract

In recent years there has been considerable progress in the operation of tunable uv solid state lasers based on trivalent cerium doped fluoride crystals, most notably Ce:LiCAF, Ce:LiSAF and Ce:LiLuF. The pump bands for cerium doped fluorides are in the 250-290nm spectral region, thus requiring a deep uv pump laser. Typically frequency quadrupled Nd:YAG lasers are used to pump Ce:LiCAF and Ce:LiSAF, and KrF excimer lasers for pumping Ce:LiLuF. These pump lasers generally only give short pulses (<20 ns) at PRFs of tens of hertz, thus limiting their suitability for pumping high pulse repetition rate cerium lasers. However recently kHz PRF cerium lasers have been developed using a 10ns frequency quadrupled Nd:YVO₄ pump laser [1].

© 1998 IEEE