The electric-discharge-excited carbon monoxide laser is one of the most efficient laser sources known that is scalable to very high continuous wave powers. We review work at Ohio State where such lasers are used to excite flowing molecular gas plasmas, in mixtures of CO and other diatomic gases, including air. These plasmas are stable, diffuse, and can be operated at high gas pressures and low gas kinetic temperature. They are being employed for various plasma chemistry applications. Recent results are presented in which such an "optically pumped" plasma reactor is used to synthesize single-walled carbon nanotubes, which show surprising order and alignment
1NFRODUCTIONThe electrically-excited carbon monoxide (CO) gas laser, operating on the CO fundamental infrared band around 5It wavelength, remains one of the most efficient high power lasers that is scalable to very high c.w. outputs. CO lasers have a demonstrated thermal conversion efficiency, electrical power in to broadband laser output, of flth 50% '. Systems have been built with c.w. or average powers in the MW range?'3. Despite these impressive performance levels, CO lasers have not been widely employed in industrial applications, and are still rather uncommon even in the research laboratory. The most important cause of this neglect is undoubtedly the need for operation at cryogenic gas temperatures to achieve the highest efficiency. The bestperforming systems have gas temperatures of -425K. Even if the necessary cooling of the system is charged against performance, the overall efficiency ofa closed cycle system can be a respectable 3Ø%4, still a leader among gas lasers. The systems complications of providing the requisite degree of cooling, however, with the consequent capital and operational costs, commonly act against the laser being the system of choice.Further drawbacks include the well-known feature that the laser output at the highest powers and efficiency is obtained when operating the system as a broadband oscillator. In this case, the output is strongly multi-line, being distributed over some tens ofvibration-rotation spectral lines range from -4.7 to 5.7 t wavelength. Further, some of these lines are strongly absorbed by water vapor, degrading performance in applications involving transmission through moist atmospheres. Intense work, continuing in recent years, led by the Gas Laser Laboratory at the Lebedev Institute in Moscow and Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland AFB, has led to considerable mitigation of these problems. CO lasers are being developed with good single line, or restricted wavelength multiline, performance on both the CO fundamental band and the first overtone band at 2.5However, performance is still below the broadband levels, and such line selection operation has its own systems complications.Notwithstanding these difficulties, the high power and efficiency of CO lasers at mid-IR wavelengths make them intriguing sources for certain advanced processing applications. Such applications involve using the laser to create larg...