Class Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser Research Articles

Off-axis negative-branch unstable resonator in rectangular geometry

The application of an off-axis negative-branch unstable resonator to an active medium of rectangular geometry is examined. The presented unstable resonator consists of spherical mirrors and a scraper mirror. The adaptation to the rectangular cross section is performed by the scraper, which takes two different shapes. One shape resembles a rectangular bracket "[" and the other resembles the letter "L." The [ and L configurations correspond to a shift of the optical axis away from the center of the cross section, toward one of the edges or toward one of the corners, respectively. Both scraper setups are examined numerically and experimentally. Experiments are performed with a multikilowatt class chemical oxygen iodine laser. The active medium is characterized by a low amplification coefficient. Measured results of the intensity distribution in the far field and of the phase distribution in the near field are shown for both resonator configurations. Using the same resonator magnification, the setup with the L-shaped scraper has a lower output coupling and, therefore, a higher output power and a slightly higher beam divergence. The L-shaped scraper configuration is able to cover the gain medium completely.

Chemical oxygen-iodine laser power generation with an off-axis hybrid resonator

A rectangular negative branch off-axis hybrid resonator was coupled to a 10 kW class chemical oxygen-iodine laser. Resonator setup and alignment turned out to be straightforward. The extracted power was 6.6 kW and reached approximately 70% of the power for an optimized stable resonator. The divergence of the emitted laser beam in the unstable direction was lower than two times the diffraction limit. Experimentally measured margins for mirror misalignment were found in close agreement with numerical calculations.

Experimental investigation of an unstable ring resonator with 90-deg beam rotation for a chemical oxygen iodine laser

We report the experimental results of an unstable ring resonator with 90-deg beam rotation for a kilowatt class chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL). The distributions of near-field phase and far-field intensity were measured. A beam quality of 1.6 was achieved when the COIL average output power was approximately 5 kW.