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Dye Lasers for Nonlinear Optics Applications
Sudipta Gangopadhyay

Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, that is — lasers, have become an important tool in chemistry. Lasers are ideal light sources for spectroscopy, chemical kinetics studies, and light scattering studies of molecular motion. High-powered lasers are finding use as light sources for photochemical synthesis, yielding products not available from other techniques. Dye lasers are an important class of lasers because they can be tuned to a range of wavelengths. The lasers you are probably familiar with, like He-Ne lasers, produce only fixed wavelengths and are therefore not good sources for spectroscopic studies. In this lab you will measure the absorption and fluorescence characteristics of several laser dyes and then set up a dye laser with the dyes and compare the laser emission characteristics.

Keywords: Dye Lasers, Nonlinear Optics, spectroscopy, Laser

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