Abstract
For applications including optical pumping of Ti:Al2O3 lasers, high-energy Nd laser sources with microsecond pulse widths are desired. To this end, pulsed oscillators have been operated in the lowest-order transverse mode to produce well-behaved relaxation oscillations. In certain conditions, most of the output energy can be restricted to a few discrete subpulses (i.e., the initial relaxation cycles). One of these can be isolated with an optical gate such as an acoustooptic modulator for amplification. Analyses and experiments indicate that the oscillator pulse shape obtained in this way is ideally suited to amplification without pulse shortening. In contrast, alternative long-pulse generation methods, such as gating a portion of a cw beam, yield characteristic pulse shapes that may radically narrow on amplification.
© 1988 Optical Society of America
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