A quasicontinuous tuning range of 65 nm at 3.2 m was obtained for continuous wave, single-longitudinal-mode operation at 77 K of an optically pumped distributed-feedback laser with a chirped grating. Interferometric lithography with spherical wavefronts was used to fabricate a large-area chirped grating whose period varied continuously in the direction of the grating lines. Tuning was achieved ...

This is a report on a 100 W, 20 mJ, 1 ps Yb:YAG thin-disk regenerative amplifier. A homemade Yb:YAG thin-disk, Kerr-lens mode-locked oscillator with turn-key performance and microjoule-level pulse energy is used to seed the regenerative chirped-pulse amplifier. The amplifier is placed in airtight housing. It operates at room temperature and exhibits stable operation at a 5 kHz repetition rate, ...

Chirped beam manipulations are of the great interest to the FEL (Free Electron Laser) community as potential means of obtaining ultra short X-ray pulses. The experiment is under way at the ATF (Accelerator Test Facility) at BNL (Brookhaven National Laboratory) to study the FEL process limits with the under-compressed chirped electron beam. High gain near-saturation SASE operation was achieved w...

A high power polarization maintaining femtosecond Tm-doped fiber laser system is demonstrated. A chirped fiber Bragg grating with normal dispersion was used to compensate the anomalous dispersion from the regular fiber in the 2 µm seed oscillator to generate mode locked pulses with a pulse repetition rate of 30.84 MHz. After chirped pulse amplification, an amplified power of 78 W was obtained. ...

Initial laser radar experiments used CO* gas lasers at 10 pm [ I]. These lasers enabled either stable cw operation or high-gain pulsed output and have been used for wind measurements in the atmosphere. Despite the success of COz lasers, there has recently been an increased interest in the use of solid state, 1 urn laser technologies to be used for laser radar studies. The advantages of such a s...

We report generation of 400 microJ, 13.1 fs, 1425 nm optical parametric amplifier laser pulses. Spectral broadening of a 100 Hz optical parametric amplifier laser source is achieved by self-phase modulation in an argon-filled hollow-core fiber, and dispersion compensation is performed using chirped mirrors. This laser source will be useful for ultrafast time-resolved molecular orbital tomography.

We discuss the production of ultracold molecules in their electronic ground state by photoassociation employing electronically excited states with ion-pair character and strong spin-orbit interaction. A short photoassociation laser pulse drives a nonresonant three-photon transition for alkali-metal atoms colliding in their lowest triplet state. The excited-state wave packet is transferred to th...

We present a simple and robust technique to retrieve the phase of ultrashort laser pulses, based on a chirped mirror and glass wedges compressor. It uses the compression system itself as a diagnostic tool, thereby making unnecessary the use of complementary diagnostic tools. We used this technique to compress and characterize 7.1 fs laser pulses from an ultrafast laser oscillator.

The spectroscopy of large organic molecules and biomolecules in solution has been investigated using various time-resolved and frequency-resolved techniques. Of particular interest is the early response of the molecule and the solvent, which is difficult to study due to the ambiguity in assigning and differentiating inter- and intramolecular contributions to the electronic and vibrational popul...

A modified version of the plasma beat-wave accelerator scheme is proposed, based on autoresonant phase locking of the Langmuir wave to the slowly chirped beat frequency of the driving lasers by passage through resonance. Peak electric fields above standard detuning limits seem readily attainable, and the plasma wave excitation is robust to large variations in plasma density or chirp rate. This ...