In the early work on compact, air-cooled, metal/ceramic, argon ion lasers, the emphasis was on refining designs for vacuum integrity, thermo-mechanical stability, and processing technology for relatively high volume production. As these issues are now well in hand and many thousands of these lasers are in the hands of the manufacturers customers, people are exploring the limits of their use in systems. The technical issues now are those of performance characteristics related to specific applications or proposed applica-tions. Some of these relate to what extent can the internal mirror, internal resonator design in metal/ceramic ion lasers be scaled. Improvements in optical coating technology and modification in the optical cavity and plasma tube design have allowed the air-cooled ion laser to be a more versatile, multi-wavelength or single wavelength source.

Date Published: 2 June 1988
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 0898, Miniature Optics and Lasers, (2 June 1988); doi: 10.1117/12.944570

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0898:
Miniature Optics and Lasers
Laurence E. Cramer; Gary T. Forrest; Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri, Editor(s)