Abstract

Microchip lasers is a growing and maturing field of diode pumped solid state lasers. Passively Q-switched microchip lasers are now commercial The excellent beam quality and the high efficiency of the microchip laser makes it ideal for many applications For range finding however there is a need for low jitter in time between the pulses to achieve good measuring accuracy. Work has been done to stabilise passively Q-switched lasers, by modulation of the pump light to the passively Q-switched laser[1] However, the jitter is still to large for many applications and to solve this we have reported presently on a combined actively and passively Q-switched laser[2]. In this novel design the jitter is dramatically reduced to less than 100 ps compared to 10-100 ns in a passively Q-switched laser

© 1998 IEEE