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A wide aperture kinetically enhanced copper vapor laser consisting of a ∼47mm bore and 1450mm length discharge tube is demonstrated with moderate input power of ∼5kW, and overall efficiency of ∼1.45%. The laser pulse durations were observed to be ∼60ns full width at half maximum. An increase in output power from 17to73W at ∼9.4kHz (a factor of ∼4.3) has been achieved due to kinetic enhancement effects in this laser. Output laser pulse shape monitoring was used for optimization of maximum output power from the laser.

We report for the first time the performance of axicon based conical resonators (ABCRs) in a copper vapor laser, with novel results. The unstable conical resonator comprising of conical mirror (reflecting axicon) with axicon angle approximately pi/18, cone angle approximately 160 degrees, and a convex mirror of 60 cm radius of curvature was effective in reducing the average beam divergence to approximately 0.15 mrad (approximately 25 fold reduction compared to standard multimode plane-plane cavity) with output power of approximately 31 W. Extraction efficiency of approximately 50%-60% and beam divergence of <1 mrad was achieved in other stable ABCR configurations using flat and concave mirrors with the axicon. This is a significant improvement compared to 4-5 mrad normally observed in conventional stable resonators in copper vapor lasers. The conical resonators with copper vapor laser provide high misalignment tolerance beta approximately 4-5 mrad where beta is the tilt angle of the conical mirror from optimum position responsible for approximately 20% decline in laser power. The depth of focus d was approximately three times larger in case of conical resonator as compared to that of standard spherical unstable resonator under similar beam divergence and focusing conditions.

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