Efficient copper vapor laser using metal (Cu, Ag) chlorides in thermal insulation and performance with new prism resonator configurations

Abstract

A copper vapor laser based on the use of copper chloride and silver chloride mixture embedded inside the laser head thermal insulation is successfully demonstrated. The use of external HCl generator cell containing zirconium chloride normally used for its kinetically enhanced mode of operation is completely eliminated. With this new configuration laser power of ~70 W was achieved from a wide aperture ~47-50 mm bore discharge tube with input power of ~5 kW and overall high efficiency of ~1.4% without external supply of HCl vapors to the laser head. In a typical operational cycle the laser initially operates as low temperature CuCl laser with startup time of few minutes and output power of ~10 W during low tube temperature range of ~300-500 °C. Thereafter, the laser transforms itself into efficient kinetically enhanced copper vapor laser (CVL) at high temperature range of ~1200-1600 °C with maximum laser output power of ~70 W. This dual mode of operation observed in a single CVL system is unique and has not been reported so far in any high temperature copper vapor laser. New resonator configurations, namely, the prism resonator in stable and unstable form are successfully demonstrated for the first time in a copper vapor laser to achieve low divergence beam with dramatic increase in misalignment tolerance to ~25 mrad, which is an improvement of about ~50 times compared to standard CVLs with conventional spherical or plane-plane resonators. With these new resonator configurations the CVL functions almost as an "alignment free laser" system with significantly reduced beam divergence of ~0.2 mrad and high optical extraction efficiency of ~70%-80%.