Abstract

The motivation of this work is to model the final Raman conversion stage of the SPRITE laser system at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) in which several UV pump pulses propagating at small angles amplify a Stokes seed pulse to high intensities in a 1-m light guide. A merit of this arrangement is that despite the relatively poor spatial coherence of the pump pulses, the coherence of the amplified Stokes pulse remains high. As the duration of the pulses (10 ps) is less than the relaxation time of the methane Raman medium (28 ps), the Raman interactions clearly occur in the transient regime.

© 1994 Optical Society of America