Synchronous tunable picosecond laser

A picosecond rhodamine 6GDN dye laser was constructed. It was excited longitudinally by a train of pulses of the second harmonic of the neodymium laser radiation and the pulses emitted by both lasers were fully synchronized. The divergence of the dye laser radiation was minimized by matching the optical lengths of the resonators. The dye laser was tuned, within the range 550–602 nm, by a diffraction grating with 1200 lines/mm. The efficiency of conversion of the second harmonic into the dye laser radiation was 7%. The time and spectral characteristics of the dye laser were investigated.