A versatile dye-laser generator-amplifier system for intense,tunable picosecond pulse generation

Passively mode-locked ruby-laser pulses are used to generate nearly diffractionlimited picosecond light pulses in a dye cell by longitudinally amplified spontaneous emission. The output pulses are amplified in three longitudinally pumped dye cells, then spectrally filtered with a grating spectrometer and finally reamplified in a fourth dye amplifier in order to generate intense frequency tunable picosecond light pulses.