Abstract

A ti:sapphire regenerative amplifier pumped by a cw-argon-ion laser was recently demonstrated by T. B. Norris [1]. We have developed a compact ti:sapphire mode-locked oscillator and regenerative amplifier system (Coherent RegA-9000) with a single argon-ion laser providing 8W to pump the oscillator and 14W to pump the amplifier. A 110fs duration, 820nm pulse from the Mira-900 oscillator is injected into the RegA-9000 amplifier using a TeO₂ acousto-optic cavity dumper. Chirped pulse amplification is accomplished over 25 roundtrips by allowing the dispersion in a TeO₂ Q-switch within the amplifier to expand these pulses to 30μs length. The cavity dumper then extracts a single pulse of more than 6μJ energy at a repetition rate of 250 kHz, corresponding to an average power of 1.5W.

© 1994 Optical Society of America