Prism preexpanded grazing-incidence grating cavity for pulsed dye lasers.

A modification to the grazing-incidence grating cavity for pulsed dye lasers is described whereby a prism is employed to expand the intracavity beam by a small factor before illumination of the grating. Suitable choice of the angles of incidence at both prism and grating permits good spectral resolution to be obtained while overall cavity losses are minimized. The performance characteristics of the modified cavity are analyzed and compared with those of simple grazing-incidence grating cavities. Spectral linewidths <0.01 A have been obtained at relatively high efficiencies (7-10%) for coumarin 500 dye pumped with a pulsed N(2) laser.