Abstract

There is considerable interest in high repetition- rate miniature transversely excited(TE) CO₂ lasers for their increasing applications in laser radar, ranging, remote-sensing and other industrial fields. Many of these applications require that the lasers work in a high-repetition-rate state reliably and efficiently, and have long sealed-off lifetime. In the past two decades, intensive efforts were made to improve performances of TEA CO₂ lasers.^[1]-[3] Here we report the design and performance of two kinds of TE CO₂ lasers, one of which was bare spark preionized (BSP) and another surface corona preionized (SCP). It is found that the intrinsic efficiency of the later is four times higher than that of the former under the same condition, and the lifetime of the SCP laser is also longer because some dissociation processes of gas involved in the spark preionization were avoided. A BN ceramic structure was employed as the assembly of resonators to improve the stability, which is similiar to that used in the waveguide CO₂ lasers suggested by some of the authors of this paper.^[4]

© 1995 Optical Society of America