The tunable dye laser, once a highly specialized instrument used only by laser physicists, is proving irresistible to a wider range of physicists, chemists, and engineers, as well as to biologists, physicians, psychologists, and even art historians. Recent advances in dye laser research and three noteworthy new products are pushing time-able dye lasers into more laboratories than ever before.

A colliding pulse mode-locked dye laser kit developed by Clark Instrumentation Inc. produces 100-femtosecond pulses of visible lights These extraordinarily short optical pulses of light open up a whole new class of studies involving events on a very short time scale. For example, molecular dynamicists can now explore transient effects in molecules in a time that is short compared with their internal vibrations. The short laser pulses also provide an opportunity for increasing the speed of opto-electronic and optical computing devices.

A nanosecond-duration grazing-incidence pulsed dye laser developed by Lumonincs Inc....

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of

Receive full access to digital editions of The Scientist, as well as TS Digest, feature stories, more than 35 years of archives, and much more!