Abstract

The use of halogen donor additives in conventional high temperature (1500°C) copper vapour lasers (CVLs) has recently yielded significant enhancements in laser performance. Using a technique called ‘kinetic enhancement’ (KE), H₂ and HCl buffer-gas additives have been found to increase the output power ~3× that observed for the same device operating with pure neon buffer-gas. For a 38mm bore CVL, it was shown that using H₂-HCl-Ne gas mixtures increased output 1.5× and 1.3× that when using pure Ne and Ne with H₂ additive respectively at the nominal CVL pulse repetition frequency (PRF) of 6 kHz. When increasing PRF, output increased linearly up to 22 kHz at which point the output power (150W) corresponded to 2.8× and 2.3× the maximum output power recorded for the tube when operated with either neon buffer-gas without or with hydrogen additive (53 W and 65 W respectively). In addition to the output power increases, the spatio-temporal characteristics of the KE-CVL

© 1998 IEEE