Abstract
Over recent years significant progress has been made on the production of ultrashort pulses in the passively mode-locked colliding pulse (CPM) dye laser. Pulses having durations in the tens of femtosecond regime have been generated by the control of intracavity group velocity dispersion (GVD) which can compensate for self-phase-modulation (SPM) effects produced in the pulse due to off resonant absorber saturation and Kerr effect nonlinearities in the dye solvent [1]. The cavity dispersion can be controlled by several means: a 4-prism sequence, first reported by Valdmanis et al [2] has now achieved pulse durations <30 fs [2,3] whereas other workers have controlled GVD by the inclusion of thin film interferometers or Gires-Tournois interferometers (GTI’s) in the laser cavity [4], but pulse durations reported to date exceed 50 fs. The underlying reason for this latter observation is the inherent difficulty encountered in providing an adjustable linear GVD within the cavity without also introducing higher-order dispersion terms. Indeed below 50 fs, when the spectral bandwidth of the pulses becomes relatively large, it is difficult to design a GTI as a practical intracavity component having adequate amounts of adjustable GVD which is linear across the bandwidth of the pulse. Prism systems are much more attractive in this respect.
© 1988 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
J. Heppner and J. Kuhl
WK5 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 1986
Miriam R. X. De Barros, R. S. Miranda, and C. H. Brito Cruz
FX3 OSA Annual Meeting (FIO) 1989
P. M. W. FRENCH and J. R. TAYLOR
THJ3 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 1988