Abstract

We report development of a high repetition rate flashlamp-pumped Nd:YAG regenerative amplifier used to pump an ultrashort pulse dye amplifier. The novel feature of the regenerative amplifier is that the flashlamps are pulsed at repetition rates of up to 1080 Hz. When seeded by a few nanojoules 60-ps pulse from a cw mode-locked laser, output energies of over 2 mJ are obtained from the regenerative amplifier. Further amplification in two single-pass flashlamp-pumped amplifiers increases the pulse energy to over 25 mJ. This is to be compared to cw-pumped schemes where output energies are restricted to 1 mJ or less¹ resulting in amplified ultrashort pulse energies of only several microjoules.

© 1988 Optical Society of America