Abstract

Flashlamp-pumped dye lasers have proved to be a valuable source of tunable, high-energy laser radiation. A particular problem with this type of laser, however, is the inherently poor spatial quality of the generated radiation because of aberrations in the gain medium caused by the flashlamp pumping. Addressing this problem, we have investigated a phase-conjugate resonator (PCR) to improve the beam quality. We attempted to maintain the high output energies from the flashlamp-pumped dye laser by replacing one of the conventional dielectric mirrors with a stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), phase-conjugate reflector.

© 1991 Optical Society of America