Abstract
In recent years, CO2 lasers have been developed which employ excitation geometries with gain regions in the shape of a thin elongated slab of gas confined between two metal electrodes.1,2 These lasers produce beams which take on the profile of the gain region cross section, i.e., a thin strip typically a few millimeters by a few centimeters. Such beam patterns are undesirable from an applications perspective, since the diffraction limited beam at the focal plane of a focusing system would have an asymmetric shape and the focal depth would be small. The ideal would be to extract a narrow Gaussian beam while still sampling the large gain area of the strip-line configuration.
© 1991 Optical Society of America
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