Pulsed Lasers

This chapter provides an overview of a wide variety of pulsed lasers, their operating principles, their attributes that might be useful in a variety of applications, and reviews the types of lasers that are commercially available. Pulsed lasers are versatile tools for scientists and engineers and have played an important role in the development of modern optical physics. Pulsed lasers have proven to be especially helpful in the study of transient phenomena that occur in time intervals as short as femtoseconds or as long as milliseconds or beyond.Pulsed lasers have also been useful in helping researchers to study and apply effects, which scale nonlinearly with increasing optical field strength, because of their high peak power. At present, pulsed lasers are widely used in areas ranging from atomic and molecular spectroscopy to remote sensing and from fiberoptic communications to laser medicine. The chapter provides a step-by-step guide to the building of pulsed tunable dye lasers of varying levels of performance. Pulsed tunable dye lasers are representative of most pulsed lasers, with the added feature that they are especially forgiving of imperfect optical elements and operating conditions.