Dye Laser - Narrow Linewidth Dye Lasers

Narrow Linewidth Dye Lasers

Dye lasers' emission is inherently broad. However, tunable narrow linewidth emission has been central to the success of the dye laser. In order to produce narrow bandwidth tuning these lasers use many types of cavities and resonators which include gratings, prisms, multiple-prism grating arrangements, and etalons.

The first narrow linewidth dye laser, introduced by Hänsch, used a Galilean telescope as beam expander to illuminate the diffraction grating. Next were the grazing-incidence grating designs and the multiple-prism grating configurations. The various resonators and oscillator designs developed for dye lasers have been successfully adapted to other laser types such as the diode laser. The physics of narrow-linewidth multiple-prism grating lasers was explained by Duarte and Piper.