Electro-optically cavity-dumped ultrashort-pulse Ti:sapphire oscillator

Summary form only given. Acousto-optical cavity-dumping (AO) has been demonstrated 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 /spl mu/m. 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). 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.