This is the pulse of my photographic flash. I'd call it 2 milliseconds long. I'm surprised at how long it trailed off.

This is the pump light, as observed just down stream from the amplifier. Note the two spikes, those are the laser pulses. The pump light is long enough for the laser itself to fire, recharge, and fire again. I'd call the pulse 250 microseconds long, which is approximately YAG's 230 microsecond florescence time.

There is a little bit of a trick to getting this data. The detector was looking at a piece of postit which the reflection off the brewster polarizer was shining onto. Looking at the laser beam from the side really doesn't get you much light.

And this is a single laser pulse, sort-of. The oscilloscope can't actually sample at a Ghz, though it can choose when to sample at that time resolution. So this is really a large number (as in 100 to 200) of pulses, each of which provided one or two samples. Note the vertical artifacts.