Widely tunable single-longitudinal-mode pulsed dye laser

We have developed a simple cavity-length-stabilization method appropriate for single-longitudinal-mode pulsed lasers that use grazing-incidence gratings. Our technique relies on the detection of aminute (<0.5-mrad) angular variation in the output beam direction caused by a detuning betweenthe cavity-mode frequency and the center frequency of the grating passband. In a prototype systemimplementing this stabilization scheme we have generated single-longitudinal-mode scans of up to 290cm(-1).