Abstract

We report characteristics of pulses. from a synchronously pumped dye laser with a saturable absorber (hybrid mode locking). With a mixture of rhodamine 6G and DQCI we obtain pulses as short as 0.2 psec. Measurements of the power spectrum¹ reveal the following characteristics of the pulse fluctuations. The energy fluctuations are 2-3% (ms) with a correlation time of ~0.4 μsec. The temporal pulse jitter is 0.1 % (rms), which corresponds to ~12 psec on en absolute time scale, The temporal jitter is caused by the jitter of the pump laser and has a correlation time of 0.5 msec. Fluctuations of the pulse duration of 40-50% on a time scale of ~50 nsec are interred from the power spectrum of the second harmonic.

© 1985 Optical Society of America