Abstract

Pulsed copper lasers have a unique capability to produce high average powers in the tens-to-hundreds of watt regime at high beam quality (near diffraction-limited) in the visible as required for a wide range of applications (of which laser micromachining is currently the most important). Elemental copper vapour lasers (CVLs) have a well 11-developed technology and have been scaled to very large volumes, but generally give lower electrical-to-optical conversion efficiencies and lower specific powers (especially at high beam quality) than the copper bromide or copper HyBrID versions.

© 1998 IEEE