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.

Date Published: 4 May 2015
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 9543, Third International Symposium on Laser Interaction with Matter, 95431M (4 May 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2181842

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9543:
Third International Symposium on Laser Interaction with Matter
Yury M. Andreev; Zunqi Lin III; Xiaowu Ni; Xisheng Ye, Editor(s)