High energy widely tunable narrow-linewidth Ti:sapphire laser using combined-cavity configuration

Abstract

A high-energy narrow-linewidth Ti:sapphire laser with widely tunable wavelength was investigated. The Littman cavity was seeded by an extended prism cavity, and they were coupled together by sharing a partial reflection mirror. The widely wavelength tunability of the prism cavity and the linewidth compression of Littman cavity were incorporated together, which resulted in a significantly increased tunable wavelength range from 720 nm to 884 nm with linewidth of less than 100 MHz. The coupling effect and the synchronization between the two cavities in temporal and spectral domain were discussed. The narrow-linewidth laser centered at 786 nm was further amplified to 36 mJ and frequency-doubled to 393 nm with pulse energy of 18.8 mJ while maintaining the narrow linewidth at a repetition rate of 10 Hz. This widely tunable narrow-linewidth laser is a promising light source for high-resolution fluorescence spectroscopy.