Optically Pumped Gas Lasers

Tunable infrared lasers

“…Figure 14 shows the calculated phase-matching curves for difference-frequency mixing in CdGeAsz using CO and CO2 laser radiation. The points along this curve have been experimentally verified by Kildal and Mikkelsen (1974).…”

“…power was used to generate 400 mJ of second harmonic energy by Kildal and Deutsch (1976). The frequency doubling results described above can easily be extended to sum-and difference-frequency generation with comparable performance.…”

Lasing in 15 atm CO2 cell optically pumped by a Fe:ZnSe laser

“…Lasing was also studied in CO-CO2-He mixtures utilizing the indirect pumping scheme, in which CO molecules are optically excited and energy is collisionally transferred to the CO2 asymmetric stretching mode and thus the upper laser level (see Figure 1(b)). This scheme is motivated by the potential of further increasing the gain lifetime at high pressures due to the slow exchange of vibrational energy in a dual molecular system where the absorbing twoatomic molecule has a long relaxation time [8]. This scheme may also be used to avoid deleterious nonlinear refraction that can occur in CO2 [16], which has a dipole moment three times larger than that of CO.…”

“…The small quantum defect between the first vibrational level of CO and the first level of the CO2 asymmetric stretching mode allows energy to be efficiently transferred from CO to CO2. Lasing was demonstrated in a CO-CO2-He mix at a total pressure of 16 atm by pumping CO at 4.8 µm using the second harmonic of a 9.6 µm TEA CO2 laser [8]. Less than 1 mJ of 10 µm light was generated, however, as this method faces a similar lack of energetic pump sources.…”