Abstract

Sources of tunable, energetic, femtosecond pulses are of substantial interest to a variety of scientific communities. Previously, femtosecond pulses in the microjoule range were only possible through complex dye amplifier schemes. With the introduction of self-modelocked Ti:sapphire oscillators, tunable sub-100 fs pulses became available although most of the experiments ask for spectral ranges not reachable by Ti:sapphire oscillators alone. In addition to generating short pulses, Ti:Al₂O₃ has also been shown to be an outstanding amplifier for producing ultra-high peak power pulses. Although energies up to 1 J have been produced, the maximum repetition rate of these amplifiers is typically on the order of 10 Hz. This low repetition rate prevents the use of powerful spectroscopy techniques such as heterodyne or phase sensitive detection. We previously demonstrated multi-kHz amplification of femtosecond pulses¹ wich was a first step toward the production of tunable high power pulses tunable over the whole optical spectrum. We present here a femtosecond source producing microjoules pulses tunable from 250 nm to 2 μm.

© 1994 Optical Society of America