The dynamical response of InAs/GaAs quantum-dot microdisk lasers has been experimentally investigated using femtosecond optical pumping. Because surface recombination and carrier diffusion are suppressed in the quantum dots, the response speed of a quantum-dot microdisk laser is much faster than that of a quantum-well microdisk laser. A turn-on time as short as 7.8 ps has been achieved in a qua...

Spatial variations of the laser mode and pumping rate are incorporated into the theory of conventionally pumped lasers that produce squeezed light. Both a quantum-mechanical theory and a heuristic statistical model are used. While variations in the laser mode are found to have a negligible effect on squeezing, variations in the pumping rate are significant. The maximum attainable squeezing is a...

We report generation of four-wave mixing enhanced by electromagnetically induced transparency and optical pumping in a ladder-type atomic system. When two pumping laser beams are used to form a conjugate small-angle static grating, both four-wave and six-wave mixing processes are shown to exist at the same time. Interference between these two nonlinear wave-mixing signals is experimentally demo...

Pulses of 100-fsec duration are obtained by synchronous pumping of a colliding-pulse ring dye laser with a mode-locked Ar(+)-ion laser. Stable operation of the synchronously pumped colliding-pulse mode-locked laser over hours was obtained by a suitable choice of the distance between the gain and the absorber in combination with an appropriate pump-pulse sequence.

Optical pumping of atomic vapors can lead to self-focusing of resonant laser beams. The saturation of the optical pumping process at low intensity allows the study of transverse solitons in the form of selftrapped laser beams, using low-power cw lasers. The long lifetime of the optically pumped atoms allows the atomic diffusion to transport the excitation away from the interaction region. Numer...

We report on the room-temperature spectroscopic properties and continuous-wave laser operation of a new Yb:LuVO4 crystal. The peak absorption cross section for the pi-polarization is 8.42 x 10(-20) cm2 at 985 nm, and the stimulated emission cross section at 1020 nm is 1.03 x 10(-20) cm2. An output power of 0.36 W at 1041 nm was obtained with a slope efficiency of 47% by use of Ti:sapphire laser...

An optically-pumped intersubband laser generator is proposed in which the continuum states above an A1 0.2Ga 0.8.4s GaAs A1 o2Ga o.sAs single quantum well with a width of L = 17 nm serve as the highest level in a four-level laser system. The design allows much greater flexibility in the choice of pumping source and simplifies considerabb the device fabrication. We have obtained the electronic s...

The steady-state and transient dynamics of phase locking in a two-element Nd:YAG laser array have been studied. By creating two evanescent-coupled lasers in a Nd:YAG étalon using diode end pumping, the coupling strength between the laser elements in the array can be continuously varied by adjusting the positions of the pumping beams. This allows the observation of the phase-locking process over...

When stimulated Raman pumping (SRP) is applied to a stream of isolated molecules, such as found in a supersonic molecular beam expansion, we show that SRP can neither saturate nor power broaden a molecular transition connecting two metastable levels that is resonant with the energy difference between the pump and Stokes laser pulses. Using the optical Bloch-Feynman equations, we discuss the pum...

We address the peak power scaling of our DPSS MOPA system from 10 MW to >100 MW (anticipated) at multi-kHz for OPCPA pumping. We discuss the challenges in scaling this Nd-based picosecond amplifier system. OCIS codes: (140.0140) Laser and laser optics; (140.3280) Laser amplifiers