Gewinngeschaltete Ti:Saphir-Laser mit ultrabreitem Abstimmbereich

Ti:Sapphire is one of the most preferred gain media for tunable solid-state lasers in the near infrared spectral region. Since the beginning of the new millennium the performance of tunable Ti:Sapphire lasers has gained a significant technology push by the steady increase of output power of commercially available pump lasers and by the progress in the field of broad-band optics. However, the development of gain-switched Ti:Sapphire lasers lags behind the advances made in mode-locked tunable systems. In the work presented here the reasons for this drawback are analyzed, and a systematic study of further development perspectives is conducted. For this purpose a detailed theoretical analysis of such lasers is derived from fundamental physical principles and validated experimentally. It delivers meaningful selection and design rules for all relevant optical elements and their configuration inside the laser resonator. Additionally, the fundamental performance limitations of the investigated class of lasers as well as the technical limitations of today’s optical components required to build them are derived, distinguished and quantified by summarizing theoretical and experimental investigations. Based on this knowledge, the output power integrated over the tuning range can be doubled for gain-switched Ti:Sapphire lasers compared to the former state-of-the-art. A tuning range of 400 nm is demonstrated with only one set of cavity optics. For laser operation in a TEM00 mode, at a repetition rate of 1 kHz and at a laser wavelength of 790 nm, the output power is 4.3 W with a pulse duration of 8 ns and a spectral line width of 12 GHz. Consequently, output power and tuning range of such a laser are now comparable to that of mode-locked tunable Ti:Sapphire lasers, but with three orders of magnitude more spectral brightness per pulse