Synchronized picosecond pulse generation with a synchronously pumped dye laser and a compressed Nd: YAG laser for non-degenerate transient grating experiments

We have set up a laser system which simultaneously provides synchronized picosecond pulses in the visible and at a wavelength of 1.06 m with a repetition rate of 76 MHz. The set-up consists of a dye laser synchronously pumped by the second harmonic of a cw mode-locked Nd:YAG laser and a fiber-grating compressor for the fundamental wavelength of the Nd;YAG laser. Crosscorrelation measurments reveal the time jitter between the two pulse trains to be less than 10 ps. As a first application we have performed non-degenerate transient grating experiments in semiconductors. The non-degenerate technique allows to use excitation energies well above the bandgap energy and to separate non-linear refractive index effects from photoinduced absorption or transmission changes.     

Speeding-up and scaling of domain-wall relaxation nearT c of a uniaxial ferromagnet

The dynamic susceptibility () measured between 10 Hz and 10 MHz on different GdCl₃-ellipsoids (T _c=2.21 K) reveals a completely reversible motion of the domain walls. Taking into account the contribution of the fast adiabatic intradomain magnetization to the nearly Debye-shaped (), we determine for the first time the kinetic Onsager coefficientL _d of the domain wall relaxation of a ferromagnet. Approaching the CurietemperatureL _d speeds up critically, which by a novel simple relaxational model can be related to the increasing width (=correlation length) of linear Bulaevskii-Ginzburg domain-walls and to the shrinking domain period. The reduction ofL _d by an external field can be represented by a universal scaling function, and within the same dynamical model, this effect is ascribed to the increase of the domain period, predicted for a bubble phase. However, the effect of sample size onL _d is much smaller than expected.     

Spectroscopic investigation of the ionization kinetics in XeCl laser discharges by Xe* density measurements

Time and spatially resolved absorption measurements of Xe^* particle number densities performed at an X-ray preionized self-sustained XeCl^*-laser discharge were used to investigate the reaction kinetics of such discharges and to test the validity of the commonly-made assumption that they are fit well by spatially homogeneous numerical models. It turned out that the Xe^* density distribution over the discharge cross section remains homogeneous for less than 100 ns only. Comparing the experimental results of the homogeneous discharge phase with zero-dimensional model calculations, we conclude that induced emission modeled using two excited xenon levels must be taken into account for the quantitative interpretation of the absorption measurements. For the interpretation of the Xe 6s-6p absorption measurements even a multilevel model will be necessary. Further we conclude from the relative courses and the absolute values of the Xe^* particle number densities that realistic HCl kinetics should contain three vibrationally excited levels and stepwise excitation processes as proposed by Dem'yanov et al. [8].