Abstract
Laser resonators based on waveguide propagation in slab geometry provide a method for effectively extracting power from gain media that are naturally limited in thickness by thermal conduction and temperature. The CO2 and CO gas lasers are in this category, and have been shown to produce powers of 30 kW•m2 (Ref. 1) and 15 kW•m-2 (Ref. 2), respectively, in multimode output from waveguide slab discharges with rf excitation. Effective ways of attaining single-mode operation without sacrificing these power levels are of great interest, and the hybrid waveguide-unstable resonator3 has been the main approach up to the present. This paper describes a new technique that combines the properties of high-order lateral waveguide modes and the principle of coherent imaging, commonly called the Talbot effect, to stabilize a single waveguide mode which has high spatial and temporal coherence, and a high power extraction, corresponding to 22 kW•m-2 for a CO2 slab laser with 1.44-mm electrode separation.
© 1992 Optical Society of America
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