An engineering effort is proposed as Phase II for the development of a process and equipment for use in frequency control of pulsed lasers to achieve very high frequency stability, to the limit given by the inverse of the pulse duration. There exists a variety of important laser radar applications for which energetic laser pulses are needed at a frequency stability at this level. The existing method to achieve such high stability consists of a mopa configuration in which the output of a stable cw laser is amplified in a large pulsed power amplifier bank. This approach suffers from two 14ajor drawbacks: large size and instability to retain the frequency stability in the presence of the intense acoustics and microphonics environment in an aircraft. LSI's proposes "v"-processor for pulse laser frequency control is based on an adaptive process. The "v"-processor senses the fluctuations of an incident laser pulse at its input referenced against a stable optical clock. The processor removes,the fluctuations from the same pulse electro-optically at a delay time. It also anchors the pulse frequency at the clock frequency. The proposed engineering phase will develop a complet "v"-processor of the form outlined in this proposal based on design efforts completed in Phase I.
