COMPACT, HIGH-GAIN PULSED DYE AMPLIFIER FOR WEAK CW SOURCES

A compact two-cuvette dye amplifier capable of pulse amplifying weak cw visible sources by factors in excess of 109 has been demonstrated. Seeded with a 300-muW single-frequency He-Ne laser and without the need for a Faraday isolator, the preamplifier yields >40-muJ pulses of 4.5-ns duration and 1.4x transform-limited linewidths around 140 MHz. Subsequent power amplification yields 4-ns FWHM, 2-mJ pulses with excellent pulse-to-pulse stability and linewidths around 170 MHz. Scaling of the operational envelope and extension to pulse amplification of cw single-mode tunable diode lasers is discussed.