Subpicosecond Oscilloscope

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The proposed research is aimed at building a compact laser pulse source which has been the bottleneck for five years in development of an ultrafast optically triggered oscilloscope, an instrument imprtant in the evaluation of high speed integrated circuits and microwave devices. Current laser pulsers are large, require continuous maintenance, and consume up to 15 kilowatts of electricity. The pulse source proposed here uses low maintenance diode laser, is small, and draws a few watts of power. This very special instrumentation is needed to test the new highspeed integrated circuits, GaAs microwave devices and picosecond transistors, for picosecond synchronization of electron beam devices and high energy lasers, for generating precise waveform high power microwave bursts, and for driving analog to digital converter with 30 GHz sampling rates. Picosecond resolution is needed to extract the maximum speed and efficiency and therefore economic advantage from ultrafast electronics. The pulse optical source use multiple semiconductor lasers which operate at different frequencies and are phaselocked together to produce pulses. This unique approach solves the bandwidth and group velocity mismatch problems rater than fighting with them as in done in present modelocked lasers. The project objectives include a simple preliminary demonstration of the concept and enough modeling to interpret the results..j.>***//