Optimal operating regime of saturable absorbers in mode-locked lasers

An investigation was made of ultrashort pulse generation by passive mode locking in a rhodamine 6G jet laser with pulsed laser pumping of up to 300 nsec duration. In order to obtain single ultrashort pulses per axial period in these systems, it was essential to reduce their time of formation to several loop passes. It was shown experimentally that the rate of formation of ultrashort pulses is influenced appreciably by the nonlinear absorber dye and, for a given intracavity intensity, the best dyes are those having a purely electronic transition near the lasing frequency. In this case, the critical bleaching intensity and relaxation time are minimized as a result of the increased role of stimulated resonance transitions in the dye modulator. Optimal types of polymethine dyes are suggested for nonlinear absorbers of tunable ultrashort-pulse rhodamine 6G lasers.