Abstract

The colliding pulse modelocking (CPM) dye laser has established itself as the work horse of femtosecond optics and spectroscopy owing to the ease of generating stable optical pulses of less than 100 fsec duration. The probably most important improvement of the CPM laser has been the addition of a four-prism sequence to adjust the intracavity group velocity dispersion¹. However, the characterization of its amplitude noise has not received sufficient attention. We show in this manuscript that the strong amplitude noise of the CPM laser at frequencies of several MHz can be significantly reduced by simply inserting a single frequency etalon in the cavity of the (argon-ion) pump laser.

© 1990 Optical Society of America