Alexandrite laser pumps 1.5-micron OPO lidar system

Researchers from Light Age Inc. (Somerset, NJ) and Princeton University (Princeton, NJ) are jointly developing a narrow-bandwidth lidar system for aerosol detection with NASA Phase I SBIR funding. The lidar system will be driven by a tunable 500-mJ/pulse alexandrite laser that pumps an optical parametric oscillator (OPO) providing bandwidths less than 100 MH¥with 䔮-MH¥stability. The lidar measurements are based on a filtered Rayleigh-scattering technique developed at Princeton. The