Amplification of nanosecond laser pulse chain via dynamic injection locking of laser diode

We report a novel optical pulse generation method for high-speed wavelength switching of amplified nanosecond (ns) laser pulses resonant to atomic transitions.Under free-running condition, a slave laser diode is blue-detuned with tens of GHz relative to the master laser. A ns pulse chain generated by modulating the continuous-wave master laser with a fiber-pigtailed electro-optical intensity modulator is injected into the slave laser diode to fast switch the slave laser's wavelength back and forth. The output beam of slave laser is filtered by a temperature-controlled etalon to get the amplified pulse chain. Based on our dynamic injection locking scheme, we produce a ns-scale square pulse chain with an effective ON/OFF ratio 10^8, considering at least the 60 dB scattering suppression by tuning light-atom interactions with far off-resonance detuning and 26.7 dB suppression ratio of the etalon. By studying the dynamic processes of injection locking, we determine the dependence of injection locking on both the injection power and the frequency detuning.