Abstract

High power and efficient carbon dioxide laser operation has been achieved with diffusion cooling in compact devices using the large area slab RF discharge technique [1]. An alternative approach to laser power scaling, useful when technological constraints limit the power which may be extracted from individual laser oscillator, is to employ the array laser concept. Considerable work has been done on developing techniques for producing phaselocked operation, both with laser diode arrays and with arrays of waveguide gas lasers. Here we consider planar and 2-d laser arrays based on multiple elemental waveguide carbon dioxide laser oscillators, operating in the mutually incoherent mode. The waveguide CO₂ laser is a very suitable building block for laser arrays because it produces excellent intrinsic beam quality, is scaleable in monolithic planar and stacked plane geometries, and may be conveniently excited from a single radiofrequency power generator.

© 1996 IEEE