Abstract

There is a great interest in developping a very compact source emitting tunable picosecond pulses with a few milliwatts of average power in the UV at high repetition rate (> 10 kHz). This kind of source will be useful for the detection of molecules by time resolved fluorescence in the biomedical domain for example. To reach those specifications, a simple way is the use of a gain-switched picosecond laser diode whose pulses are amplified in diode-pumped crystals having good energy storage capabilities. The concept of injection seeding of gain-switched laser diode in amplifiers was already demonstrated [1,2]. However, to our knowledge, the previous systems operated at a fixed wavelength.

© 1998 IEEE