Abstract

The 2μm Ho:Tm lasers are primary candidates for several remote sensing missions on NASA Mission to Planet Earth. Such lasers should find other remote sensing missions in terrestrial applications. Furthermore, these lasers have many other potential uses in the field of medicine, communications, and so forth. They can be efficient, even operating at room temperature, by utilizing laser diode pumping. However, the physics associated with their operation is very complicated due to the many manifolds involved and due to the many processes associated with each manifold. To understand the physics of these devices, and thence to optimize their performance, requires parameters describing the properties of these manifolds. One of the important parameters is the nonradiative transition rate. It was the intention of this work to experimentally measure these parameters. Subsequently, these new data were used to verify existing scaling laws which describe the nonradiative transition rate in terms of the properties of the laser material and the specific manifolds of rare- earth ions.

© 1995 Optical Society of America