LOW-THRESHOLD, SINGLE-FREQUENCY, COUPLED-CAVITY TI-SAPPHIRE LASER

A novel coupled resonator was developed for narrow-bandwidth, tunable, solid-state lasers. Stable, single-longitudinal-mode, gain-switched t itanium:sapphire pulses were obtained across a 130-nm operating range limited by the cavity optics. The low threshold fluence of 0.7 Jcm(-2) makes the cavity attractive for other tunable laser media, particular ly when gain is low or parasitic loss is high. A model has been develo ped that can be used to predict the mode structure of the coupled cavi ty and for optimization at specific wavelength regions. (C) 1997 Optic al Society of America.