Abstract
In two recent papers,1,2 it was demonstrated that the stability of a synchronously mode-locked dye laser can be dramatically enhanced if the laser is coupled to a highly attenuating external cavity. The method is effective with feedback levels as low as 1 part in 1010. As shown in Ref. 3, the technique requires the external cavity to be slightly shorter than the main cavity so that the weak replica of the mode-locked pulse fed back to the main cavity is located far down the leading edge of the parent profile. Its effect is to isolate the pulse from phase and amplitude fluctuations originating in the noise background, which are the source of instability and jitter in these systems.4 In contrast to coupled-cavity mode-locking, interferometric precision in the length of the external cavity is not needed, and the minimum intensity of the feedback is set only by the requirement that at the point where the replica is located, it should significantly exceed the intensity of the profile or the noise background.
© 1991 Optical Society of America
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