Temporal smoothing of multimode dye-laser pulses

Pulses from a broadband dye laser operating in many modes have been temporally smoothed by passing them through a strongly saturated dye amplifier in the presence of a strong, nonsaturable absorber. The standard nonlinear coupled partial differential equations based on the rate-equation approximation have been used to model the amplifier. Both analytic and numerical solutions for the equations show that under attainable conditions the intensity of the amplified pulse follows the temporal shape of the pump pulse.