An identical pair of pulsed power systems has been designed to drive the 60 em aperture amplifier as part of the Naval Research Laboratory's NIKE KrF laser system. The KrF gas volume is pumped from two opposite sides by 60 em x 200 em electron beams which are produced by two totally independent systems. Each pulse power system includes a 240 kJ Marx, four (parallel) 5 ohm water filled coaxial p...

A Yb-fiber amplifier seeded by a 1083 nm DBR diode laser is fiber coupled with an external cavity diode laser (814 nm to 870 nm) and differencefrequency mixed in a periodically poled lithium niobate crystal (3.25 μm to 4.4 μm). Phase matching characteristics and the spectroscopic detection of several trace gases using this compact sensor will be reported. OCIS code: (190.2620) Frequency convers...

An analysis of tnmel-diode low-level detection is presented for the purpose of explaining some of the unusual detection characteristics that occur under certain hias conditions. For example, in the vicinity of its inflection hias point, a tmmel diode exhibits a discriminator-like rectification behavior with two sensitivity peaks. When biased at one of these peaks, the diode is capable of unusua...

A tunable femtosecond solid-state amplifier system that uses only 3 W of 488-nm argon-ion pump power has been demonstrated to deliver microjoule pulses at repetition rates up to 20 kHz, with a maximum pulse energy of 14 mu;J obtained at 5 kHz. An all-solid-state, tunable, diode-pumped Cr:LiSrAlF(6) regenerative amplifier has been demonstrated, for the first time to our knowledge, that amplifies...

We demonstrate a multistage erbium fiber amplifier seeded by a gain-switched laser diode operating at a wavelength of 1550 nm and a repetition rate of 1 MHz. The pulse energy is 0.5 μJ, and the pulse duration is 40 ps, resulting in a peak power of 11.4 kW. The three-stage all-fiber amplifier system is designed to avoid any spectral distortions induced by gain saturation or nonlinear effects and...

We report the generation of up to 0.7 mW of narrow-linewidth (<60-MHz) radiation at 3.3 micrometers by difference frequency mixing of a Nd:YAG-seeded 1.6-W Yb fiber amplifier and a 1.5-micrometers diode-laser-seeded 0.6-W Er/Yb fiber amplifier in periodically poled LiNbO3. A conversion efficiency of 0.09%/W (0.47 mWW-2 cm-1) was achieved. A room-air CH4 spectrum acquired with a compact 80-m mul...

Abstrac t-A logarithmic current-to-voltage converter for measuring DC currents in a wide dynamic range (from 1 pA to 1 mA) is described here. The converter is based on an operational amplifier circuit with a standard commercially-available LED diode used as a nonlinear feedback. A temperature compensation method requiring only one reference amplifier was used. This significantly reduces the com...

Picosecond pulses emitted from a gain-switched laser diode have been amplified in a Ti:sapphire regenerative amplifier indirectly pumped by a 4-W laser diode. This all-solid-state system produced microjoule pulses tunable from 803 to 840 nm at repetition rates up to 25 kHz with durations of 70-100 ps. By frequency doubling and tripling the output, we generated blue and UV pulses tunable from 40...

We report continuous-wave single-pass second-harmonic generation (SHG) in 4-mum -period 0.5-mm-thick backswitch-poled lithium niobate. Pump sources at 920-930 nm include both Ti:sapphire and diode-oscillator-amplifier lasers. SHG of a Ti:sapphire laser at 6.1%/W efficiency, producing 61 mW of power at 460 nm, is demonstrated in 50-mm-long periodically poled lithium niobate samples with a nonlin...

We report a diode-pumped Yb:KYW amplifier delivering up to 27 mJ pulses at a repetition rate of 100 Hz and a spectral bandwidth of 5.5 nm, centered at around 1030 nm. The system is based on a double-head multipass amplifier configuration where the pump thermal load is distributed over two relatively thin laser crystals, which permits a sufficiently large number of passes with minimal passive lo...