Injection seeding in a dual-cavity gain-switched Ti:Sapphire laser

Abstract

An experimental investigation of a pulsed tunable injection-seeding system pumped by a Nd:YAG laser is presented. The slave laser (SL) of the system is a gain-switched Ti:Sapphire laser with a dual-channel competitive cavity which consists of a main ring channel and an auxiliary linear one with different lengths. The use of this configuration results in full and reliable suppression of both the perturbing reverse radiation from the SL to the master laser (ML) and the broadband spectral background of the SL's ring channel. This is achieved irrespective of the ratio between the energies of the SL and ML, fluctuations of laser parameters, and spectral detuning. We take advantage of the gain-switched regime of the Ti:Sapphire laser to avoid simultaneous competition between the SL's channels; this allows us to obtain spectrally pure, unidirectional output radiation with high seeding and overall efficiency. The principle of operation of the ring-linear-cavity Ti:Sapphire slave laser provides a natural optical isolation between the SL and ML; this makes such lasers suitable for use as regenerative amplifiers when seeded by single-frequency diode lasers as well as in chirped-pulse-amplification systems to amplify ultrashort laser pulses without the necessity of optical isolators.