Laser pulses, coherence property measurements

The first optical laser, the ruby laser, was built in 1960 by Theodore Maiman. Since that time lasers have had a profound impact on many areas of science and indeed on our everyday lives. The monochromaticity, coherence, high-intensity, and widely variable pulse-duration properties of lasers have led to dramatic improvements in optical measurements of all kinds and have proven especially valuable in spectroscopic studies in chemistry and physics. Because of their robustness and high power outputs, solid-state lasers are the workhorse devices in most of these applications, either as primary sources or, via nonlinear crystals or dye media, as frequency-shifted sources. In this experiment the 1064-mn near-infrared output from a solid-state Nd YAG laser will be frequency doubled to 532 nm to serve as a fast optical pump of a raby crystal. Ruby consists of a dilute solution of chromium 3 ions in a sapphire (AI2O3) lattice and is representative of many metal ion-doped solids that are useful as solid-state lasers, phosphors, and other luminescing materials. The radiative and nonradiative relaxation processes in such systems are important in determining their emission efficiencies, and these decay paths for the electronically excited Cr ion will be examined in this experiment. 

This property has been used to measure the coherence properties of laser pulses [28]. Because it is readily obtainable by Fourier transform from the... 

One way of studying temporal coherence in laser systems is by measuring photon statistics [224]. In this technique the transient laser emission properties are measured using pulsed excitation and a time-resolved setup [225], The transient emission curve generated by each pulse above the laser threshold intensity is divided into time intervals that are smaller than the emission coherence time. The number of photons is then measured in each time interval and for each pulse, and a photon number histogram is calculated to obtain the probability distribution function (PDF) of the photons for each time interval. Photon statistics is achieved separately for each time interval, and correlation between different time intervals or between different wavelengths of the emission spectrum can be also studied. It is expected that for coherent radiation the Poisson distribution determines the PDF, whereas for noncoherent light... 

A strict derivation of the comb properties is not feasible as it depends on the special dispersion characteristics of the laser cavity and these data are not accessible with the desired degree of accuracy. Instead we only assume that the laser emits a stable coherent pulse train without any detailed consideration of how this is possible. Further we assume that the electric field E(t), measured for example at the output coupler, can be written as the product of a periodic envelope function A ) and a carrier wave C(t) ... 

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