ABSTRACT
The application of these lasers outside research laboratory environments has been, up to now, very limited because of their complexity and difficulty of operation, and because of the high prices of commercially available laser systems. In terms of both pulse energy and repetition rate, cavity-dumped laser systems are in between oscillators and amplifier systems, and thus are ideal laser sources for many applications such as microstructuring, laser surgery, tissue manipulation, multiphoton microscopy, and laser spectroscopy. The first part of this chapter is organized as follows: After a brief description of the laser setup, we introduce three dynamic regimes which are dependent on different dumping frequencies. The pulse-to-pulse stability, the transient spectra, and autocorrelations are discussed with respect to the theoretical model. A numerical evaluation of the laser dynamics is carried out and compared to the experimental results.
