Perspectives of capacitive discharge application for pumping of metal vapor lasers with modified kinetics

Abstract

The paper presents the study of CuBr lasers excited by longitudinal capacitive discharge. Performance characteristics of the laser with outer electrodes using various excitation circuits are considered. The effect of HBr additive on the discharge and lasing characteristics of capacitively excited CuBr laser is contrasted to that of conventional pulse-periodic discharge with inner electrodes. It is shown that when using such a type of pumping the influence of electronegative HBr additive depends on the type of the excitation circuit that is used. The best results are achieved when using the circuits providing a high rate of rise of the discharge current. The maximum increasing of output power and laser efficiency (up to 3 times) with HBr additive was obtained in a gas discharge tube of a relatively large bore (2.7 cm), which suggests good output power scaling of CuBr-HBr laser with capacitive discharge pumping.