Abstract

The control of the pulse duration is mandatory to many applications of pulsed monomode lasers, such as Doppler lidar, remote sensing, etc. However, in general, this duration is fixed by the parameters of the laser cavity. One strategy to continuously control this duration consists in tuning the ratio R of the saturation powers in the absorber and the gain medium, hence changing the time needed to bleach the intracavity absorption.¹ This can be realized by varying the laser mode radii in the gain medium and in the absorber,² but at the expense of a decrease of the laser power for long pulse durations. To modify R, we have chosen to use the peculiar features of two-axis lasers.

© 2002 Optical Society of America