Getting closer. Got the nitrogen laser pumping a cuvette to make the dye laser part. Need to optimize it now and add the collimation and tuning. Fiber gets here in a week or so. This is harder than it looks. I don’t know how to add images so I’ll send someone the mov files from my phone to post.
so when I put a grating to collect a beam and send it back to the cuvette I don’t see anything happening. So do I need to add a partial mirror as an OC too to make it work? Granted for the continuum that’s not needed but I want to use this as a nice small dye laser too.
yea google is my friend but your easier. Oh and I found I get a better return by letting part of the pump spill onto the side of the cuvette. It must be acting like a mirror. It also is brightest at an angle
Yes, you need a partial mirror as the OC 30-50% reflectance will work just fine. the diffraction grating will need to be on a stable adjustable mount. You also need to to adjust the pump power. Wide open, an MNL-100 will drive the cuvette to superradiance which will swamp any feedback from the grating, so you need to dial it down to get it to tune.
For Supercontinuum generation, lose the diffraction grating and replace it with a mirror. The dye laser does not need to be tunable for SC generation and in fact a large line-width of ~10nm seems to be desirable* (*Though other papers suggest it may not be so critical)
Dye lasers can be finicky things, my suggestion is to go all out and build a nice stable cuvette holder (made mine from aluminium box section), on a nice stable platform, with decent mirror mounts.
Odd but no one seems to sell partially reflecting mirrors. Everything is rated 45AOI. I have some beamsplitters I will try.
Don't worry about the rated AOI, they will provide plenty of feedback. I used 1 inch plate beamsplitters from thorlabs, and they work just fine: https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppag...ctgroup_id=914