High-power Ar-N<inf>2</inf>transfer laser at 3577 Å

Abstract

A peak laser power of 0.5 MW with an estimated efficiency of 0.2 percent has been obtained at 3577 Å from a mixture of 92 psia Ar and 8 psia N <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> which was excited by an <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">E</tex> -beam of 400 A/cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> at 1.3 MeV in a 20-ns pulse. A saturation intensity of ∼100 kW/cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> was deduced and a beam divergence of 10 mrad was measured from the laser having a 10-cm gain length.