I think that when the pulse width is equal to the period of the laser it should operates like a continuos wave laser.
The nearest I came to answer this question was to partially switch the pockels cell or modulation devise within the cavity of the laser. I was able to produce a train of ten of to twenty pulses with around 10mJ . The advantage is that the pulse duration was then limited by the Pockels cell recovery time of around 3ns. The objective was to observe high speed turbulence in air with a pulse separation of 1-5 microsecs. The problem was not achieving this its was the cost, availability, sensitivity and resolution of a suitable camera for recording the images. The cost of the electronic control was also an issue. But it worked fine.
Peter
Pulsed lasers are routinely operated in what is known as a "quasi-cw" mode in which the laser is pulsed at some (typically) high frequency. For many processes, the frequency can be set to be high enough that the laser appears to operate continuously. One must be careful with this though, because with ultrafast lasers, there are many laser/material interactions that are non-thermal or nonlinear. Two lasers with the same average power but different pulsewidths and frequencies may behave very differently in an application because the peak power can be very different.
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