With an improved water-base dye solvent and 24-W all-lines pumping from an argon laser, we have generated 5.6 W of stabilized single-frequency output from a ring laser in rhodamine 6G dye. With this solvent, a mixture of ammonyx-LO and ethylene glycol chilled to 10 degrees C, thermal distortion of the jet no longer limits the dye laser output power, and the tuning curves reported here are all limited by available pump input levels. This single-frequency system has been optimized over the entire visible spectrum (407-887 nm), and results for the eleven best dyes are presented.

We report the design of a dye laser capable of producing 20 picosecond pulses at repetition rates of up to lk Hz with energies of up to 50 1J. The problems associated with the design of this laser will be discussed.In recent years the synchronously pumped dye laser has evolved into one of the most widely used sources of tunable picosecond and sub -picosecond pulses. The typical output of these systems is at most a few tens of nanojoules. If higher energy is required the output is amplified.Recently Wisoff et all reported the development of a dye laser designed to be pumped by the output of a mode locked and Q-switched Nd:YAG laser that produced pulses from 10 -30 picoseconds duration at repetition rates of 6 -10 Hz. The laser described in this paper has been designed to use an acousto -optic cavity dumper. Figure 1 shows the optical layout of the laser. A telescope configuration (M2 and M3) allows selection of the appropriate beam waist sizes in the dye cell and acousto -optic Bragg cell.The prism beam expander is used to select the spot size at the grating thereby allowing the user to generate a Fourier transform pulse with given duration. M4R=15 cm D2 GRATING /PRISM BEAM EXPANDER M5 R :7.5cm FLOWING DYE CELL Ml FLAT R=15cm M3 M2 R=15cm FOR R6G: D1 =169mm D2 :170 mm WAIST SIZE IN THE A.O. CELL= 26 pm WAIST SIZE IN THE DYE CELL :230pmFigure 1. Dye laser optical schematic. D1In the case of the mode locked, Q-switched pump laser, the pump beam consists of bursts of only about 25 pulses and it is therefore difficult to produce the short pulses generated by conventional synchronously pumped dye lasers. It has been shown2'3 that the temporal structure of the pulse is related to the dye laser circulating energy density and that the best pulses are generated when the energy density is low. The implied condition is that after amplification of the traveling pulse through the amplifier medium, the left over energy in the pump pulse trailing edge is not sufficient to raise the oscillator above threshold again. To maintain high energy and short pulses at the output of the dye laser, the diameter of the beam at the gain medium must then be made large. Experiment has shown that energy densities of 2 m7 /cm2 to 5 m7 /cm2 at the gain medium will yield good pulses. If the energy density is too highs the pulse will display considerable temporal structure and if the energy density is too low there is a large loss of energy at the output as the pulse forms too late in the train of pump pulses. Figure 2 shows autocorrelation traces for increasing power densities. Note the increase in full width at quarter maximum of the pulse as the energy density increases. 16 / SPIE Vol 610 Scientific and Engineering Applications of Commercial Laser Devices (1986)High energy visible and UV picosecond pulses from a cavity dumped dye laser, pumped by a C.W. mode locked and Q-switched Nd:YAG laser AbstractWe report the design of a dye laser capable of producing 20 picosecond pulses at repetition rates of up to Ik Hz with energies of up to 50 yJ. The p...