Abstract

We built a Ti:Al₂O₃ based oscillator / regenerative amplifier system capable of high power femtosecond pulse generation at high repetition rate. The oscillator used in this experiment was a self-modelocked Ti:Al₂O₃ laser¹, pumped by an Argon-ion laser. It produces 100 mW, 90 fs pulses at 82 MHz. It is tunable from 730 to 800 nm and was used at 764 nm in the present experiment. It was followed by a regenerative amplifier pumped by a Q- switched Nd:YLF laser. In order to fully exploit the storage capability of Ti:Al₂O₃ we used chirped pulse amplification¹. The experimental set-up is shown in Fig.1. The Ti:Al₂O₃ amplifier cavity is a folded, astigmatically compensated resonator. The pump laser is a newly designed, cw-pumped, acoustooptically Q-switched, Nd:YLF laser from Laser Photonics (model KYD-101). This laser runs on the 1.047 μm Nd:YLF line and is intracavity frequency doubled. The frequency doubled light contains up to 10 mJ per pulse at 1 kHz, and 1 mJ at 10 kHz in a uniformly distributed multimode output beam. The pulse duration is 250-400 ns, ideally suited for pumping Ti:Al₂O₃.

© 1992 The Author(s)