Effect of nitric oxide on gain and output power of a non-self-sustained electric discharge pumped oxygen-iodine laser

Abstract

This letter discusses the effect of nitric oxide on gain and output power of a pulser-sustainer discharge excited oxygen iodine laser. Adding small amounts of NO to the laser mixture ͑a few hundreds of ppm͒ considerably increases gain and output power due to ͑i͒ O atom titration and resultant slower I * atom quenching and ͑ii͒ improved stability of the dc sustainer discharge, which allows stable operation at significantly higher discharge powers. Gain on the 1315 nm iodine atom transition and laser power in the M = 3 transverse laser cavity are 0.049% / cm and 1.24 W, at a flow temperature of T = 100 K.

O2(a1Δ) quenching in the O/O2/O3 system

“…However, the complexity and weight of the chemical generators required for high-power operation pose problems for field deployment [3]. Consequently, there has been a long standing interest in the possibility of developing a discharge driven laser (DOIL) where O 2 (a 1 D) is produced via an electric or microwave discharge [6][7][8][9][10][11].…”

Recent advances in the development of discharge‐pumped oxygen‐iodine lasers

“…The initial thinking was that NO, which is easily ionized, would help to reduce the ratio. In practice it was found that the addition of small flows of NO had a minor effect on the discharge voltage, but greatly improved the O (a) yield [12,16,28,29]. This effect has been partly attributed to the removal of O atoms by the sequence (12) (13) Oxygen atoms in the discharge lead to the undesirable formation of O , and this chemistry is also suppressed by the addition of NO.…”

“…Three different groups have investigated DOIL's that employ pulser-sustainer discharges [29,34,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]. This approach permits the application of non-self sustained discharges with low ratios.…”

“…This performance was achieved without adding nitrogen oxides to scavenge the O atoms. Subsequently, Hicks et al [29] added NO to the discharge mixture, which increased the gain to 0.049% cm and the extracted laser power to 1.24 W. The positive effect was attributed to both O atom removal and stabilization of the DC component of the discharge. Most recently this group has constructed a larger version of their cross-discharge channel to examine the potential for scaling [48].…”

“…To date the reactions (27) and (28) www.lpr-journal.org have been examined. The F or Cl atoms were derived from the reactions (29) and (30) The use of DI is preferred for reaction (27) as HF is a much more aggressive quencher of I* than DF. Chemical generation of I atoms by both schemes has been demonstrated.…”