Matthew D. Rotondaro

Efficient potassium diode pumped alkali laser operating in pulsed mode.

This paper presents the results of our experiments on the development of an efficient hydrocarbon free diode pumped alkali laser based on potassium vapor buffered by He gas at 600 Torr. A slope efficiency of more than 50% was demonstrated with a total optical conversion efficiency of 30%. This result was achieved by using a narrowband diode laser stack as the pump source. The stack was operated in pulsed mode to avoid limiting thermal effects and ionization.

Modeling of pulsed K diode pumped alkali laser: Analysis of the experimental results

A simple optical model of K DPAL, where Gaussian spatial shapes of the pump and laser intensities in any cross section of the beams are assumed, is reported. The model, applied to the recently reported highly efficient static, pulsed K DPAL [Zhdanov et al, Optics Express 22, 17266 (2014)], shows good agreement between the calculated and measured dependence of the laser power on the incident pump power. In particular, the model reproduces the observed threshold pump power, 22 W (corresponding to pump intensity of 4 kW/cm2), which is much higher than that predicted by the standard semi-analytical models of the DPAL. The reason for the large values of the threshold power is that the volume occupied by the excited K atoms contributing to the spontaneous emission is much larger than the volumes of the pump and laser beams in the laser cell, resulting in very large energy losses due to the spontaneous emission. To reduce the adverse effect of the high threshold power, high pump power is needed, and therefore gas flow with high gas velocity to avoid heating the gas has to be applied. Thus, for obtaining high power, highly efficient K DPAL, subsonic or supersonic flowing-gas device is needed.

Measurements of the gain medium temperature in an operating Cs DPAL

A Mach-Zehnder interferometer was used for contactless measurement of the temperature of the gain medium within a static cell of Cs DPAL. The maximum temperature recorded approached 700° C leading to a significant degradation of laser performance. This work also examined lasing and non-lasing heat deposition and has shown that as much as 85% of the heating in a DPAL gain medium can be attributed to quenching.

Experimental study of the Cs diode pumped alkali laser operation with different buffer gases

Abstract. Cs diode pumped alkali laser (DPAL) operation using ethane, methane, and mixtures of these hydrocarbons with the noble gases He and Ar as a buffer gas for spin–orbit relaxation was studied in this work. The best Cs DPAL performance in continuous wave operation with flowing gain medium was achieved using pure methane, pure ethane, or a mixture of ethane (minimum of 200 Torr) and He with a total buffer gas pressure of 300 Torr.

Low-pressure cesium and potassium diode pumped alkali lasers: pros and cons

Abstract. This paper presents the results of our experiments on a comparative study of cesium and potassium diode pumped alkali lasers (DPALs) aimed to determine which of these two lasers has more potential to scale to high powers. For both lasers, we have chosen a “low-pressure DPAL approach,” which uses buffer gas pressure of about 1 atm for spin-orbit mixing of the excited states of alkali atoms to provide population inversion in the gain medium. The goal of this study was to determine power-limiting effects, which affect the performance of these DPALs, and find out how these limiting effects can be mitigated. We studied the performance of both lasers in CW and pulsed modes using both static and flowing gain medium and pump with different pulse duration. We observed output power degradation in time from the initial value to the level corresponding to the CW mode of operation. As a result of this study, some essential positive and negative features of both DPALs were revealed, which should be taken into account for power-scaling experiments.

Thermal effects in Cs DPAL and alkali cell window damage

Experiments on power scaling of Diode Pumped Alkali Lasers (DPALs) revealed some limiting parasitic effects such as alkali cell windows and gain medium contamination and damage, output power degradation in time and others causing lasing efficiency decrease or even stop lasing1 . These problems can be connected with thermal effects, ionization, chemical interactions between the gain medium components and alkali cells materials. Study of all these and, possibly, other limiting effects and ways to mitigate them is very important for high power DPAL development. In this talk we present results of our experiments on temperature measurements in the gain medium of operating Cs DPAL at different pump power levels in the range from lasing threshold to the levels causing damage of the alkali cell windows. For precise contactless in situ temperature measurements, we used an interferometric technique, developed in our lab2 . In these experiments we demonstrated that damage of the lasing alkali cell starts in the bulk with thermal breakdown of the hydrocarbon buffer gas. The degradation processes start at definite critical temperatures of the gain medium, different for each mixture of buffer gas. At this critical temperature, the hydrocarbon and the excited alkali metal begin to react producing the characteristic black soot and, possibly, some other chemical compounds, which both harm the laser performance and significantly increase the harmful heat deposition within the laser medium. This soot, being highly absorptive, is catastrophically heated to very high temperatures that visually observed as bulk burning. This process quickly spreads to the cell windows and causes their damage. As a result, the whole cell is also contaminated with products of chemical reactions.

Low pressure cesium and potassium Diode Pumped Alkali Lasers: pros and cons

This paper based on the talk presented at the Security plus Defence 2015 Conference held at Toulouse, France in September 2015. In this paper we present the results of our experiments on a comparative study of Cesium and Potassium based DPALs aimed to determine which of these two lasers has better potential for scaling to high powers. For both lasers we have chosen a so called “low pressure DPAL approach”, which uses buffer gas pressure of about 1 Atm for spin-orbit mixing of the exited states of alkali atoms to provide population inversion in the gain medium. The goal of this study was to determine power limiting effects, which affect performance of these DPALs, and find out how these limiting effects can be mitigated. The experiments were performed using both static and flowing gain medium. In our experiments, we studied the performance of both lasers in CW and pulsed modes with different pulse duration and observed output power degradation in time from the initial value to the level corresponding to the CW mode of operation. As a result of this study, we revealed some essential positive and negative features of both DPALs, which should be taken into account for power scaling experiments.

Study of Potassium DPAL Operation in Pulsed and CW Mode

This paper presents the results of our experiments on development of the efficient hydrocarbon free Diode Pumped Alkali Laser based on potassium vapor buffered by He gas at 600 Torr. We studied the performance of this laser operating in pulsed mode with pulses up to 5 ms long at different pulse energies and cell temperatures. A slope efficiency of more than 50% was demonstrated with total optical efficiency about 30% for the pump pulses with duration about 30 μs. For the longer pump pulses the DPAL efficiency degraded in time with a characteristic time in the range from 0.5 ms to 4.5 ms depending on the pump pulse energy and cell temperature. The recorded spectrum of the side fluorescence indicates that multi-photon excitation, energy pooling collisions and ionization may be strong candidates for explaining the observed performance degradation.

Potassium diode pumped alkali laser performance study using He, Ar, CH4 and C2H6 as buffer gas (Conference Presentation)

We examined the performance of potassium diode pumped alkali laser (K DPAL) using He, Ar, Methane (CH4), Ethane (C2H6) and a mixture of He and CH4 as a buffer gas to provide spin-orbit mixing of the 4P3/2 and 4P1/2 states of Potassium atoms. We found that pure helium as an efficient buffer gas for K DPAL with a static gain medium can be used only for pulsed operation with up to 50 µs pulse durations. The performance degradation of K DPAL with pure helium for longer pulses can be explained by ionization, which causes an effective reduction in neutral alkali atoms number density. Using a flowing system for the K DPAL allows improving its operation in continuous wave (CW) mode, but for efficient lasing with pure He buffer gas, a considerable flow speed of about 100 m/s is required. In contrast, using a small amount of methane or ethane (10-20 Torr) mixed with helium at total pressure of about 1 atm, an efficient continuous wave lasing can be achieved with very moderate flow speeds of about 1 m/s. Argon buffer gas was also tested in this experiments, but it did not support lasing neither in pulsed nor in CW mode of K DPAL operation.

Lasing degradation effects in diode-pumped alkali lasers

Experiments on power scaling of Diode Pumped Alkali Lasers (DPALs) revealed some limiting effects, which cause output power degradation in time, alkali cell windows and gain medium contamination and damage, lasing efficiency decrease or even lasing termination. These problems can be connected to thermal effects, ionization, chemical interactions between the gain medium components and alkali cells materials. Study of all these and, possibly, other limiting effects and ways to mitigate them is very important for high power DPAL development. This paper (based on the talk presented at the SPIE Security + Defence Conference, Berlin, Germany, 10-13 September 2018) presents our results on the study of limiting effects causing lasing degradation. We performed contactless measurements of temperature rise in the gain medium of an operating DPAL based on Cs and K atoms with different buffer gases including hydrocarbons and noble gases and measured critical for degradation temperatures. In these experiments we also observed side fluorescence from the lasing gain medium, which allows studying excitation of higher energy levels because of alkali atoms ionization and recombination.