Amplified Spontaneous Emission Reduction by Use of Stimulated Brillouin Scattering: 2-ns Pulses from a Ti:Al(2)O(3) Amplifier chain.

We constructed a cw Ti:Al(2)O(3) master oscillator-dye preamplifier-Ti:Al(2)O(3) power amplifier system that generates <2-ns, 100-mJ pulses. The system is tunable from 750 to 890 nm and has a repetition rate of 30 Hz. The output pulse has a near Fourier-transform-limited bandwidth of ~240 MHz. Backward stimulated Brillouin scattering is used to control the growth of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). The content of ASE in the final output is under our detection limit (<10(-4)) for the entire tuning range.