Design and construction of a tunable pulsed Ti:sapphire laser

In this paper, design and construction of atunable pulsed Ti:sapphire laser and numerical solution ofthe corresponding rate equations are reported. Rate equationsfor a four-level system are written and their numericalsolution is examined. Furthermore, an optical setup is introduced.In this setup, a Ti:sapphire crystal is longitudinallypumped by the second harmonics of a Q-SwitchedNd:YAG laser, and a prism is used as a wavelengthselectiveelement as well. This setup is established for two10 and 50 % transmission output couplers. In case of usingthe 10 % coupler, the output energy of the laser, for thepump energy of 36 mJ, is pulses with 3.5 mJ energy andfor the 50 % coupler, with 50 mJ of pump energy, pulseswith 10 mJ energy are generated. A wavelength tuningrange of more than 160 nm is possible. The repetition rateof this laser is 10 Hz and the temporal duration of thepulses is about 30 ns.