Titanium-sapphire laser oscillators, femtosecond

This is just what has been done with Ag2. A sputtering source followed by a phase-space compressor chamber provided a beam of cooled negative cluster ions of many sizes. From these, the dimers were selected, accumulated in a quadrupole trap, and photodetached with a femtosecond, titanium-sapphire laser. After photodetachment by a 60-fs pulse, the neutral dimers oscillate, causing corresponding oscillations in the ionization cross section, in turn generating the oscillations that dominate the intensity pattern in Fig. 11. This is a simple phenomenon, yielding in a simple way the... 

Here, the principal features and characteristics of the ultrafast laser systems used are briefly summarized. Besides the titanium sapphire laser which acts as the workhorse in nearly all of the discussed experiments, a synchronously pumped dye laser is employed to study the ultrafast dynamics of Nas on a picosecond timescale (see Sect. 3.2.2). For measurements with femtosecond time resolution and wavelengths located between 600 and 625 nm a synchronously titanium sapphire pumped optical parametric oscillator followed by frequency doubling is used. To investigate the Nas C state, two mode-locked titanium sapphire lasers have been synchronized. In all cases the essential parameter of the generated laser pulses, the pulse width, has to be determined. This problem is solved by an autocorrelation technique. Hence, the principles of an autocorrelator are briefly described at the end of this section. 

---