Employing polymethine dyes as saturable absorbers and intracavity Fabry-Perot interferometers, a flashlamp-pumped cresyl-violet dye laser has been mode locked to produce picosecond pulses (3–5 psec) frequency tunable from 644 to 704 nm. The frequency tuning ranges of mode-locked rhodamine 6G and rhodamine B dye lasers have also been extended to cover 584 to 645 nm.

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The buildup of picosecond pulses in a passively mode-locked rhodamine 6G dye laser has been directly studied with a picosecond streak camera. It is shown how a single isolated picosecond pulse evolves from the initial intensity fluctuations.

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Picosecond pulses of transform-limited durations (Δt∼3 psec; ΔtΔν∼0.5) have been obtained from a passively mode-locked Rhodamine 6G dye laser, frequency tuned over a range of 230 Å with an intracavity Fabry-Perot filter. Self-phase-modulation frequency broadening at higher powers has also been measured giving a value n2 = 10−18 cm2V−2 for the nonlinear refractive index of the ethanol dye solvent.