Low pressure cesium and potassium Diode Pumped Alkali Lasers: pros and cons

Abstract

This paper based on the talk presented at the Security plus Defence 2015 Conference held at Toulouse, France in September 2015. In this paper we present the results of our experiments on a comparative study of Cesium and Potassium based DPALs aimed to determine which of these two lasers has better potential for scaling to high powers. For both lasers we have chosen a so called “low pressure DPAL approach”, which uses buffer gas pressure of about 1 Atm for spin-orbit mixing of the exited states of alkali atoms to provide population inversion in the gain medium. The goal of this study was to determine power limiting effects, which affect performance of these DPALs, and find out how these limiting effects can be mitigated. The experiments were performed using both static and flowing gain medium. In our experiments, we studied the performance of both lasers in CW and pulsed modes with different pulse duration and observed output power degradation in time from the initial value to the level corresponding to the CW mode of operation. As a result of this study, we revealed some essential positive and negative features of both DPALs, which should be taken into account for power scaling experiments.