Ti Sapphire Laser

Ti sapphire laser excitation Chem. Phys. Lett. 233 519-24... 

In order to achieve a reasonable signal strength from the nonlinear response of approximately one atomic monolayer at an interface, a laser source with high peak power is generally required. Conuuon sources include Q-switched ( 10 ns pulsewidth) and mode-locked ( 100 ps) Nd YAG lasers, and mode-locked ( 10 fs-1 ps) Ti sapphire lasers. Broadly tunable sources have traditionally been based on dye lasers. More recently, optical parametric oscillator/amplifier (OPO/OPA) systems are coming into widespread use for tunable sources of both visible and infrared radiation. 

Spence D E, Kean P N and Sibbett W 1991 60 fs pulse generation from a self-mode-locked Ti sapphire laser Qpt. Lett. 16 42—4... 

Pshenichnikov M S, de Boeij W P and Wiersma D A 1994 Generation of 13 fs, 5 MW pulses from a cavity-dumped Ti sapphire laser Opt. Lett. 19 572-4... 

Tilsch M and Tschudi T 1997 Self-starting 6.5-fs pulses from a Ti sapphire laser Opt. Lett. 22 1009-11... 

A further advantage, compared with the alexandrite laser, apart from a wider tuning range, is that it can operate in the CW as well as in the pulsed mode. In the CW mode the Ti -sapphire laser may be pumped by a CW argon ion laser (see Section 9.2.6) and is capable of producing an output power of 5 W. In the pulsed mode pumping is usually achieved by a pulsed Nd YAG laser (see Section 9.2.3) and a pulse energy of 100 mJ may be achieved. 

The layout of the experimental set-up is shown in Figure 8-3. The laser source was a Ti sapphire laser system with chirped pulse amplification, which provided 140 fs pulses at 780 nm and 700 pJ energy at a repetition rate of 1 kHz. The excitation pulses at 390 nm were generated by the second harmonic of the fundamental beam in a 1-nun-thick LiB305 crystal. The pump beam was focused to a spot size of 80 pm and the excitation energy density was between 0.3 and 12 ntJ/crn2 per pulse. Pump-... 

For near-field imaging based on nonlinear or ultrafast spectroscopy, light pulses from a femtosecond Ti sapphire laser (pulse width ca. 100 fs, repetition rate ca. 

Figure 4.6 shows an apparatus for the fluorescence depolarization measurement. The linearly polarized excitation pulse from a mode-locked Ti-Sapphire laser illuminated a polymer brush sample through a microscope objective. The fluorescence from a specimen was collected by the same objective and input to a polarizing beam splitter to detect 7 and I by photomultipliers (PMTs). The photon signal from the PMT was fed to a time-correlated single photon counting electronics to obtain the time profiles of 7 and I simultaneously. The experimental data of the fluorescence anisotropy was fitted to a double exponential function. 

In addition, combining the microscope with the use of a pulsed laser light source provides temporal information on these systems in a small domain. The dispersion of refractive index, however, strongly affects the temporal resolution in the measurements of dynamics under the microscope and typical resolution stays around 100 fs when a Ti Sapphire laser is used as an excitation source. 

Historically, this has been the most constrained parameter, particularly for confocal laser scanning microscopes that require spatially coherent sources and so have been typically limited to a few discrete excitation wavelengths, traditionally obtained from gas lasers. Convenient tunable continuous wave (c.w.) excitation for wide-held microscopy was widely available from filtered lamp sources but, for time domain FLIM, the only ultrafast light sources covering the visible spectrum were c.w. mode-locked dye lasers before the advent of ultrafast Ti Sapphire lasers. 

By launching femtosecond pulses from a mode-locked Ti Sapphire laser into an appropriate microstructured fiber, one can generate a supercontinuum output spanning from the blue to the near... 

Fig. 4.6. (A) Schematic of femtosecond Ti Sapphire laser-pumped tunable continuum source (TCS) (B) fluorescence intensity image and (C) in situ...

A much better time resolution, together with space resolution, can be obtained by new imaging detectors consisting of a microchannel plate photomultiplier (MCP) in which the disk anode is replaced by a coded anode (Kemnitz, 2001). Using a Ti-sapphire laser as excitation source and the single-photon timing method of detection, the time resolution is <10 ps. The space resolution is 100 pm (250 x 250 channels). 

The broad tunability of the Ti sapphire laser accounts for its ability to produce extremely short pulses when modelocked several companies produce models with specified femtosecond pulsewidths. While shorter pulses are, to a first approximation, better, there are some additional tradeoffs to be borne in mind. First, with very few exceptions all common time-resolved fluorescence experiments may be carried out... 

---