High-stability coaxial flashlamp-pumped dye laser

Measurements on the stability of a coaxial flashlamp-pumped dye laser demonstrated that the quality of the output can be dramatically improved by isolating the dye cell thermally from the flashlamp and ensuring uniform axially symmetric flow of the dye throughout the cell. A quadraxial laser tube in which the dye cell is surrounded by an evacuated annulus to provide thermal isolation and is terminated by specially designed end caps to provide uniform injection and removal of the dye solution was tested in a standard cavity with a 1200-line/mm grating in Littrow configuration as the dispersive element. The performance characteristics were 1-mrad divergence, 0.5-A bandwidth of the spectral distribution, and 0.04-A jitter of wavelength at maximum intensity.