A 200 W average power, narrow bandwidth, tunable waveguide dye laser

Abstract

A planar waveguide dye laser, driven by commercial xenon flashlamps with an average power output of 200 W at 50 pulse per second (pps) is described. Due to the planar structure, a narrow bandwidth operation down to 10 GHz has been obtained with a single grating arranged at grazing incidence. With this configuration, high overall efficiency up to 0.6 percent has been obtained, partially due to energy conversion of the broad-band emission spectrum of the flash-lamps by circulating an appropriate dye solution between flashlamps and reflectors.