Abstract

Recently we proposed a new laser design¹ that presents both the properties of large area discharges in one transverse direction and those of laser arrays in the other. In this scheme the different channels can be viewed as slab guides with open side walls letting part of the field be injected into the next neighboring one. When the different channels are locked, the emitted beam consists of coherent strips.^2,3 The main problem with this kind of structure is related to the amount of losses necessarily determined in the single channel in order to achieve coherence on the whole array.

© 1994 IEEE