The laser lab has three commercial pulsed lasers for conducting various experiments in the nanosecond regime. The major source of nanosecond pulses is furnished by a Continuum Q-switched Nd:YAG laser operating at 1064nm with maximum pulse energy of 450mJ at 10Hz repetition rate. Using nonlinear optical crystals, second, fourth and fifth harmonics of these near-infrared pulses can be obtained to conduct experiments requiring 10ns pulses at 532, 266 and 213nm. A nitrogen laser is used to pump a dye laser which is used to output 10ns pulses in a wide frequency range from 450 to 1000nm. Since the pulses energy is much smaller than that of the YAG laser, less than a few mJ, the N2-dye laser system is mainly used as the probe beam for pump-probe experiments.
Research related to the use of pulsed laser systems at BLL include: mechanism study of soft tissue ablation by nanosecond laser pulses from ultraviolet to near-infrared regions; animal model study of tattoo removal in skin; gene transfer study in plant cells with direct illumination and pressure-waves induced by the nanosecond laser pulses.
