Giant pulses

In this 0-switching technique, one of the cavity mirrors is effectively removed during pumping and then suddenly replaced. The build-up time of the giant pulse is determined by the switching speed and the initial gain of the pumped laser. 

In his article mainly mode-locked tunable dye lasers are discussed. Giant pulse ruby lasers (3 nsec pulse halfwidth) have been successfully used to probe electron densities as a function of time in a rapidly expanding plasma 22). The electron lifetime in the conduction band can be determined with nanosecond semiconductor lasers. By absorption of the laser pulse the electrons in the semiconductor probe are excited into the conduction band, resulting in a definite conductivity. The mean lifetime is obtained by measuring the decrease of conductivity with time 26). 

The second category comprises the flash photolysis experiments using the short high power light pulses from Q-switched lasers, furthermore all investigations of time-dependent behavior of excited dye molecules, which play an important role as active material in dye lasers or as saturable absorbers in passive Q-switched giant pulse lasers. 

A description of a fast laser photolysis experimental arrangement has been given by Porter and Topp who used a 1.5 Joule, 20nsec ruby giant pulse, frequency doubled in ADP, to measure singlet lifetimes in phenantrene, pyrene and other organic molecules. 

Fig. 9. Experimental arrangement for laser photolysis, using the frequency-doubled output from a giant-pulse ruby laser as pump pulse and the wavelength continuum from a laser-induced high-temperature gas plasma as analysing pulse. (From Novak, J.R., Windsor, M.W., ref. 15 ))...

The output from a ruby giant-pulse laser (2 Joule, 30 nsec half-width, = 6943A) passes a KH2PO4 crystal where, due to the nonlinear characteristics of this material, the second harmonic at X = 3471 A is generated with an efficiency of 3 %.The two wavelengths are separated by means of a water filled quartz prism. The ultraviolet light pulse serves as pump pulse. 

From photolysis of methylene blue by ruby-laser giant pulses, Danzinger et al. found that a 0.5 Joule, 30 nsec laser pulse causes almost total conversion of the original molecules into transients, but that the photochemical change is completely reversible. The lifetimes of three transients have been measured as 2, 30 and 140 jusec resp. at a 5.5 x 10 M dye solution. 

Sorokin and Lankard illuminated cesium and rubidium vapors with light pulses from a dye laser pumped by a ruby giant-pulse laser, and obtained two-step excitation of Csj and Rbj molecules (which are always present in about 1 % concentration at atomic vapor pressures of 10" - 1 torr) jhe upper excited state is a repulsive one and dissociates into one excited atom and one ground-state atom. The resulting population inversion in the Ip level of Cs and the 6p level of Rb enables laser imission at 3.095 jum in helium-buffered cesium vapor and at 2.254 pm and 2.293 /zm in rubidium vapor. Measurements of line shape and frequency shift of the atomic... 

Using as the background continuum the short-lived spontaneous fluorescence of rhodamine B or 6 G, McLaren and Stoicheff 233) developed this method further to obtain inverse Raman spectra over the range of frequency shifts 300-3500 cm" in liquids and solids in a time of 40 nsec The stimulating monochromatic radiation at 6940 A is provided by a giant-pulse ruby laser. A small part of the main laser beam is frequency-doubled in a KDP-crystal and serves to excite the rhodamine fluorescence, thus ensuring simultaneous irradiation of the sample by both beams. 

Because of the relatively large dispersion from the electrons compared with the almost constant refractivity of the neutrals and the negligible contribution of the ions, it is possible, with simultaneous measurements at two different wavelength, to determine independent values of the density of electrons and of the nonelectronic components in the plasma 274). Alcock and Ramsden 275) used the light from a giant-pulse ruby laser and its second harmonic generated in an ADP-crystal (ammonium dihydrogen phosphate) to probe a pulsed plasma and its time-dependent density in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. 

Fig. 6. Relative laser pulse intensity versus time of a ruby giant pulse laser that was used to bleach a solution of metal-free phthalocyanine and transmission of the dye solution at the wavelength of the He—Ne—laser. (From Ref. 14>)...

To explain this application, we consider the schematic drawing of a giant pulse laser, shown in Fig. 7. Such a laser consists essentially of (1) a rod of active material AM (for example a ruby or neodymium glass or neodymium-doped rod of yttrium-aluminum garnet) excited by the light pulse from a flashlamp F,... 

Fig. 7. Experimental arrangement of a giant-pulse laser (Q-switching by dye solution). AM, active material (e.g. ruby crystal rod), F, flashlamp, Mj, 2, resonator mirrors, DC, dye cell...

A quantitative description of giant pulse generation is again given by a set of rate equations in the simplest case one for the inversion, another for the population density mo of the dye in the ground state So and a third for the laser light intensity nc. If excited state absorption has to be taken into account, additional rate equations would have to be added as described above in the section on nonlinear absorption. 

Until recently a general drawback of this passive Q-switching scheme was the difficulty of obtaining an exact synchronization of the giant pulse with other events in more complex experiments. This difficulty does not exist with active Q-switching in which an electro-optic device, e.g. a Kerr-cell or Pockels-cell, is used instead of a dye cell, and one is able to determine exactly the time at which... 

Another application which is very similar to Q-switching is the mode-locking in solid-state lasers. This application differs from Q-switching in the following experimental details. First, instead of a cell length of 1 cm, which is most often used in giant pulse lasers, only cell lengths of 1 mm or less are applied. Second, the... 

Not long after the discovery of the stimulated Raman effect in liquids 63> it was also detected in single crystals 64), namely diamond, calcite, and a-sulfur. Only much later could it be shown that the effect can also be observed in crystal powders 651. The stimulated Raman effect 99 > is excited by giant-pulse lasers with a power of several MW. The strongest Raman lines of a substance are amplified until their intensity is of the same order of magnitude as that of the exciting line furthermore second, third, etc. Stokes lines of the fundamentals in question are observed with twice, thrice, etc. the frequency shift. 

The inverse Raman effect was detected in liquids 93> soon after the discovery of the stimulated Raman effect. When a medium is irradiated simultaneously by intense monochromatic light from a giant-pulse laser and by a continuum, sharp absorption lines are observed on the anti-Stokes side of the laser line, and under special conditions also on the Stokes side 94 >. McLaren and Stoicheff 95) used the intense fluorescence from a dye solution excited by frequency-... 

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