Partial feedback unstable resonator on small scale supersonic large aperture chemical laser

Abstract

There is always a challenge on large aperture medium power laser’s resonator design, stable resonator would supports significant higher order transverse modes, folded and telescope stable resonator are too complex and not preferred by engineers, unstable resonator need rather large round trip gain to compensate its high geometric out-coupling, which is difficult for this kind of laser since its gain length is limited due to the power level and large aperture. Partial feedback unstable resonator had been proposed to tackle this difficulty since the early days of laser development, however, the debates of its effect never stopped even with those distinguished optical resonator scientists such as Siegman, Anan’ev, and Weber. Recently integrated partial feedback unstable resonator design had been successfully demonstrated on a medium size chemical oxygen iodine laser. In this paper, we carry this resonator configuration on a small scale discharge driven supersonic nozzle array Hydrogen Fluoride chemical laser, a typical large aperture short gain length device. With magnification equals 4/3, we successfully get ten Watts level ring beam output.