High-efficiency multipass Ti:sapphire amplifiers for a continuous-wave single-mode laser

We present the amplification of a continuous-wave single-mode ring dye laser in Ti:sapphire. A peak gain of 2 x 10(6) has been obtained in a passive multipass amplifier, which yielded 20-nsec pulses of 0.7-mJ energy at 780 nm. We discuss the advantages of this passive multipass amplifier in comparison with a regenerative amplifier that we have also developed. By second-harmonic generation we obtained high-peak-power UV pulses from the amplified single-mode laser.