A pulsed dye laser with grazing incidence and folded cavity

A novel design of a transversally pumped pulsed dye laser resonator using grazing incidence in a folded astigmatic cavity is described. The stability conditions, beam waist and output divergence of the oscillating mode are derived from the ray transfer matrix for this cavity. A diffraction limited gaussian beam is obtained. The linewidth can be adjusted down to 610 MHz without using any intracavity etalon.