Pulsed Lasers
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High power pulsed lasers operate for very short periods usually for much less than one second. They can produce extremely high peak powers but only for a very short period of time. They usually have lower average powers than continuous lasers because of their low pulse repetition rate.

Short Pulse Lasers (Chirped Pulse Amplification)

Extremely short duration pulse of the order of 1 picosecond. These lasers are based on recent advances in pulse compression techniques and can produce irradiances exceeding 10²⁰ W cm^-2. This section contains a table of 32 lasers with links to laser parameters and images.

Long Pulse Lasers

Lasers whose pulse duration is of the order of 1 nanosecond used for inertial confinement fusion research. These are some of the older generation of high power lasers such as the NOVA at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. This section contains a table of 18 lasers with links to laser parameters and images.

Pulsed lasers are often based on 'Master Oscillator Power Amplifier' (MOPA) principles : A high precision oscillator injects pulses into a high power amplifier. In addition, many of the higher power lasers have vacuum target chambers and pulse compression components such as gratings. This section contains a table of 5 common laser components and links to example images.

Short pulsed lasers have created new areas of research such as plasma lasers, harmonic generation and plasma accelerators. This section contains references to research relating to these areas.

Each laser has location information in square brackets