Abstract

During the last few years, some effort has been devoted to developping femtosecond dye lasers synchronously pumped by a mode-locked pumping source, e.g. frequency doubled YAG^[1] or Argon^[2]. The advantages of such a pumping scheme have been underlined and the possibilities of synchronous amplification^[3] or of synchronisation of a tunable picosecond laser pumped in parallel^[2] were particularly emphasized. The drawback of such systems is the critical sensitivy of the pulse characteristics to cavity length variations. We designed a femtosecond dye laser pumped by a frequency doubled continuously mode-locked YAG laser and we included all the previously know improvements. Furthermore, we actively stabilized the cavity length using a new scheme that will be presented.

© 1986 Optical Society of America