Abstract

In the past few years, an area scaling technique with the advantages of simplicity and easy achieving compact high power lasers have been well developed and applied in the field of RF excited waveguide carbon dioxide and Xe and Ar lasers, which employs an RF gas discharge excited slab hollow waveguide and an unstable optical resonator combined with a diffusive cooling technique to obtain a compact high power laser. In this paper, we shall present an RF gas discharge excited carbon monoxide area scaling laser. In this laser, the top electrode was cooled with the tap water and the bottom electrode was cooled with the liquid nitrogen to maintain the slab waveguide gas discharge region at a very low temperature The discharge region has a size of 500mm length × 178mm width × 2mm height. In the experiments, a slab waveguide region was excited by a RF transverse gas discharge at a frequency of 93MHz, a new type of optical resonator consisting of a concave mirror with a curvature radius of 5390mm, a convex mirror with a curvature radius of 4330mm and a flat feedback mirror was employed, the output aperture size is 2mm × 45mm, a gas composition of CO : He : Xe : O₂ at a ratio of 8.7 : 87 : 3.9 : 0.4 with operation pressures between 50 torr and 70 torr was used, by which a maximum of laser power output of over 1 Kilowatts was obtained.

© 1998 IEEE