Abstract

Acousto-optical cavity-dumping (AO) has been demonstrated^1,2 with short-pulse Ti:sapphire lasers producing single-pulse energies of 62 nJ. However, AO cavity-dumping is inherently limited because the AO wave must traverse the beam waist in the round-trip time of the cavity limiting the beam waist to roughly 30 μm, This limits the pulse energy as the intensity must be kept below the threshold for nonlinear processes in the AO crystal. Furthermore, the contrast in the pulse energy on either side of the main cavity-dumped pulse is rather low (30:1 or 20:1).^1,2 Electro-optical (EO) cavity-dumping has no such limitation and can be scaled to higher energies with high contrast. However, there are several difficulties associated with EO cavity-dumping, all of which have now been solved.

© 1996 Optical Society of America