Abstract

The future impact of CO₂ lasers will be through the availability of higher power extremely compact sealed-off devices, and one route to this goal is through waveguide arrays where the output of many lasers is added in parallel. Radio-frequency (rf) discharge excitation provides a technique for simultaneous excitation of close-packed multiple waveguide structures, and devices have been demonstrated at powers up to 200 W.¹ The usefulness of array beams is greatly enhanced by phase-locked operation, but at present locking of greater than five rf excited channels has not been reported.

© 1990 Optical Society of America