Feasibility study of the lidar light source with an alexandrite laser

Abstract Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) Thomson scattering is an effective method for measuring electron temperature and density in magnetic confinement plasma devices. The LIDAR system requires a high output energy and a high repetition rate for the light source. We built a small alexandrite system for a feasibility study of the light source. This system includes a laser diode as a short pulse light source to be amplified, an alexandrite laser regenerative amplifier as a preamplifier and the following two-stage double-pass power amplifiers. With this system, we have obtained an output energy of 60 mJ with a pulse width of 320 ps at a repetition rate of 10 Hz.