Femtosecond Optical Pulses: Towards Tunability at the Gigawatt Level

Since 1975 different kinds of dye lasers have been developed to generate subpicosecond pulses: CW pumped passively mode locked oscillators [1], synchronously pumped lasers or more recently CW mode locked ring lasers [2] which generate pulses of duration less than 100 femtoseconds. Many more applications become accessible when these pulses are amplified to powers in the gigawatt range [3,4] and particularly if one can utilize nonlinear optical phenomena to generate pulses at different wavelengths. In this paper, we describe new techniques for producing high power wavelength tunable subpicosecond pulses, starting from the amplified outputs of CW mode locked linear or ring dye lasers, generating a white light continuum pulse and amplifying any selected spectral part of it to GW peak power.