High-Efficiency Flashlamp-Pumped Dye Laser at Low Output Energy

Organic dye lasers have been widely used for various tunable laser applications, such as high resolution spectroscopy, uranium enrichment, resonance scattering laser radar, and in medicine. Many excitation methods ofdye lasers have been developed in order to realize high efficiency, high energy and good tunability. Amongthem, linear flashlamp-pumped dye lasers are very attractive because of their high output energy, excellenttunability, easy maintenance and low cost. However, the efficiency of the low output energy flashlamp-pumpeddye lasers usually used for spectroscopy is low compared to high-energy versions. We investigated variousmethods of improving the efficiency of linear flashlamp-pumped dye lasers at low output energy, and achieveda significant enhancement in efficiency, more than 5 times that reported previously, by using a close-coupledcavity with a rectangular dye cell and compensating for the thermal distortion of the dye solution duringexcitation.