Effective SBS pulse compression to <100 ps in liquid CCl/sub 4/ and fluorocarbon

Summary form only given. The basic regularities of compression of laser pulses by backward stimulated scattering including stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) are already known quite well. The ratio of compression in single SBS-compressor's generated Stokes pulse does not exceed the threshold of the SBS increment. Therefore for the first time in order to get experimentally shorter pulses with greater compression we realised the cascade compression by using pump pulses with duration /spl sim/12 ns and Stokes pulses with duration smaller than measuring equipment resolution (200 ps) were obtained. If pump pulses have duration of /spl sim/(5-6) ns the duration of SBS-compressed pulses equals usually /spl ap/0.3 ns. To obtain shorter pulses in a single SBS-compressor shorter pump pulses have to be used. However even using pulses of duration <2 ns the compressed pulses are usually longer than 100 ps.