Abstract
Recently, optical pumping has been used to produce cw operation of a line-tunable NH3 laser in the 12-μm region.1 Acoustooptic modulators were employed to downshift CO2 radiation into exact coincidence with the NH3 sR(5,0) transition. This downshifted radiation is a very efficient optical pump of NH3–N2 mixtures. In previous work, lasing was achieved on twenty lines in ortho-NH3, with maximum output powers of 0.7 W and wavelengths ranging from 10.7 to 13.2μm. We describe an improved line-tunable NH3 laser with cw output powers as high as 5.5 W. The pumping technique has been extended to include para-NH3 transitions, and a total of sixty-five different laser transitions, with wavelengths from 10.3 to 13.8μm, has been observed in 14NH3.
© 1986 Optical Society of America
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