Development of an accelerator-ready photocathode drive laser at CEBAF

Many injector designs for free-electron lasers and linear colliders use photocathode sources in lieu of a thermionic cathode. These designs require mode-locked lasers with very tight phase and amplitude jitter specifications to achieve the electron beam quality needed for these applications. We have characterized the long term stability of a mode-locked laser for use in the injector test stand at CEBAF. The sources of drift and instabilities were studied and characterized. Initial results indicate that the most important source of drift is a change in the effective cavity length. A possible design for automatically optimizing the length is presented