Abstract

Investigations of the influence of halogens in the buffer gas of high temperature copper vapour lasers led to the recent development of kinetically enhanced devices using H₂-HCl-Ne buffer gas mixtures. Kinetically enhanced copper vapour lasers (or KE-CVLs) have performance characteristics that far exceed those of conventional CVLs. In particular, single element devices are capable of producing output powers >100W [1], 2-3x higher than those of conventional devices, and can operate at repetition rates exceeding 100kHz [2]. The temporal and spatial gain characteristics of KE-CVLs are also better suited to high beam quality extraction than conventional CVLs. Indeed, 60W within 2x the diffraction limit has been reported for a medium scale KE-CVL [3].

© 2000 IEEE