Reduction of timing jitter in a passive Q-switched solid state laser

摘要

A method and device for reducing the timing jitter in a passive Q-switched Nd:YAG solid state laser by spatially selective bleaching a thin sheet of a saturable absorber of Cr⁺⁴:YAG from a direction orthogonal to the direction of laser emission where the Cr⁺⁴:YAG transmission increases 18% when the bleaching probe beam is a single laser diode bar. For steady state operation of a passive Q-switched laser, the pulse-to-pulse timing jitter showed a −12× reduction in standard deviation from 241 nsec for free running operation to 20 nsec with optical triggering.