Abstract
An important characteristic of any pulsed laser is its pulse shape. Frequently, the pulse shapes reported in the literature for copper-vapor lasers (CVLs) have been recorded with equipment with insufficient bandwidth to accurately reveal the true CVL pulse shape. When CVLs are operated with resonators that produce high-beam-quality output (such as high-magnification and self-filtering unstable resonators), the pulse obtained with a limited-bandwidth detector and an oscilloscope (below 400-MHz bandwidth) typically has a smooth shape with at most cavity round-trip (or half-round-trip) intensity modulations, and it is very stable from shot to shot. However, when such output is examined on a subnanosecond time scale, for example, when a 1-GHz-bandwidth oscilloscope (e.g., a Tektronix 7104) is used, together with a fast vacuum photodiode (Ham-mamatsu RU1193-02) and appropriate cabling (SMA), the pulse is found to be strongly modulated by rapid (subnanosecond) random intensity fluctuations.
© 1995 Optical Society of America
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