Sub-doppler spectroscopy with a frequency-doubled tunable single-frequency Nd:YAG laser

In the authors system, the master laser is a diode-laser-pumped mini-YAG/sup 3/ with single-frequency pulsed output power of 50 mW, while the slave oscillator is a modified commercial (Quanta-Ray DCR-1A) Nd:YAG systems which outputs 0.7 J with a single amplifier stage. Cavity matching of the master and slave resonators is achieved by using a feed-back scheme similar to the polarization technique introduced by a previous work. The authors' approach, which relies on the presence of finite strain in the mini-YAG crystal resonator, detects the depolarization of light reflected by this resonator whenever the incident wave matches the Fabry-Perot resonance. Once locked, the longterm frequency stability of the system is clearly governed by the temperature stability of the mini-YAG laser (a change in temperature of only 0.010 results in a frequency drift of 31 MHz)