The energy and spectral characteristics of a room-temperature pulsed laser on a ZnS:Fe2+ polycrystal

Abstract

The energy and spectral characteristics of a laser on a ZnS:Fe2+ polycrystal operating at room temperature have been studied. The laser was pumped by a non-chain electro-discharge HF laser with a full-width at half-maximum pulse duration of ~140 ns. The diameter of the pumping radiation spot on the crystal surface was 3.8 mm. The two-sided diffuse doping of a polycrystalline CVD-ZnS sample with the surfaces preliminarily coated by high-purity iron films was performed in the process of hot isostatic pressing (HIP) in an argon atmosphere at a pressure of 100 MPa and temperature of 1290 °С. Increasing the duration of the HIP treatment from 54 h to 72 h made it possible to obtain twice the doping depth, and correspondingly, twice the length of active medium. As a result, the slope laser efficiency with respect to the absorbed energy was raised by a factor of 1.75 as compared to the value obtained in our earlier work with a polycrystalline sample. The generation energy was 25 mJ at a slope efficiency of ηslope = 35%. It was established that the generation spectra of the laser with a non-selective resonator have a linear structure with intervals between the neighboring lines of δλ ≈ 6 ÷ 8 nm, which is spurious for solid-state lasers. The spectral structure observed is not related to the elements inside the resonator, which might form Fabry–Perot interferometers.