&lt;title&gt;History of chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL) development in the USA&lt;/title&gt;

Truesdell, Keith A.; Helms, Charles A.; Hager, Gordon D.

doi:10.1117/12.204917

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…249-250]. The most promising short-wavelength chemical laser was the chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL), emitting on an iodine transition at 1.3 µm, first demonstrated in the 1977 [33].…”

Section: B E T T E R L a S E R S T H R O U G H C H E M I S T R Ymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Incredible Rocket-Engine Laser [Scanning Our Past]

Hecht¹

2020

Proc. IEEE

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By JEFF HECHT C harles Townes's original laser proposal envisioned a low-power coherent light source for communications. Theodore Maiman's demonstration of the first laser at Hughes Research Laboratories in 1960 produced bright pulses of red light and gave great hopes for bigger and better things, especially in the Pentagon. Two years later, a Sunday newspaper supplement feature titled "The Incredible Laser: Death Ray or Hope" illustrated with science-fictional laser cannons, opined: The laser may have greater impact than any discovery so far in the burgeoning field of electronics, which has already brought us radar, transistors, satellite tracking networks, [and] TV. The technological revolution it brings about may dwarf any in the past [1]. This historical article traces the invention of the gas-dynamic laser, how it successfully generated high powers, and how it failed to meet the requirements for usable directed-energy weapons and became, in the words of one observer, "a ten-ton watch." Behind closed doors, military laboratories tried to scale up Maiman's design, in which bursts of light from a coiled flash lamp powered a tiny ruby rod. Hughes Research Laboratories tried making bigger ruby lasers (quoted in [2]). AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories developed crystals doped with the rare-earth neodymium, which emitted more light than ruby, but crystals were small and hard to grow [3]. Then Elias Snitzer at American Optical Company added neodymium to optical glass, first in the form of millimeter-thick fibers [4], and later-prompted by military interest-as laser rods a few inches thick [5]. Those advances led the Pentagon to budget $5 million-big money in the early 1960s-for Project SEASIDE to develop pulsed solid-state laser weapons [6]. Air Force Chief of Staff, General Curtis E. LeMay, became a laser enthusiast, briefing a reporter that a speed-of-light laser beam would be invaluable for intercepting Soviet ICBMs [7, pp. 6-7]. A firm called Technology Markets Inc. envisioned a $1.25 billion market in 1970 for "huge lasers, not unlike the anti-aircraft searchlights of World War II, that would roam the heavens, seeking out incoming missiles and destroying or diverting them with the powerful beams of light" [8, p. 25].

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“…249-250]. The most promising short-wavelength chemical laser was the chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL), emitting on an iodine transition at 1.3 µm, first demonstrated in the 1977 [33].…”

Section: B E T T E R L a S E R S T H R O U G H C H E M I S T R Ymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Incredible Rocket-Engine Laser [Scanning Our Past]

Hecht¹

2020

Proc. IEEE

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“…COIL was eventually scaled to a MW-class laser. These developments will not be discussed here, but summaries of COIL, HF, and DF lasers are contained in refs and .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Singlet Molecular Oxygen: from COIL Lasers to Photodynamic Cancer Therapy

Davis

Zhao

et al. 2023

J. Phys. Chem. B

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Translation of experimental techniques from one scientific discipline to another is often difficult but rewarding. Knowledge gained from the new area can lead to long lasting and fruitful collaborations with concomitant development of new ideas and studies. In this Review Article, we describe how early work on the chemically pumped atomic iodine laser (COIL) led to the development of a key diagnostic for a promising cancer treatment known as photodynamic therapy (PDT). The highly metastable excited state of molecular oxygen, a1Δg, also known as singlet oxygen, is the link between these disparate fields. It powers the COIL laser and is the active species that kills cancer cells during PDT. We describe the fundamentals of both COIL and PDT and trace the development path of an ultrasensitive dosimeter for singlet oxygen. The path from COIL lasers to cancer research was relatively long and required medical and engineering expertise from numerous collaborations. As we show below, the knowledge gained in the COIL research, combined with these extensive collaborations, has resulted in our being able to show a strong correlation between cancer cell death and the singlet oxygen measured during PDT treatments of mice. This progress is a key step in the eventual development of a singlet oxygen dosimeter that could be used to guide PDT treatments and improve outcomes.

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“…The most widely used approach for laser medium generation has been the use of subsonic mixing and dissociation of molecular iodine in an O 2 ( 1 Á) medium with high dilution by a helium or nitrogen buffer gas. 1) This laser medium then expands in a supersonic nozzle, which lowers the translational temperature, and thus the threshold O 2 ( 1 Á) fraction, required for inversion and gain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-Pressure Nozzle Bank for a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser

Takeuchi¹,

Sugimoto²,

Tei³

et al. 2005

Jpn. J. Appl. Phys.

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A new nozzle bank for an ejector-chemical oxygen-iodine laser consisting of two-dimensional slit nozzles with a trip-jet mixing system was designed, fabricated, and tested with a nitrogen flow operation regime. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to optimize the trip system design. Horizontal Pitot scan experiments demonstrated that the mixing ability of the trips is excellent. The Mach number of the mixed flow was approximately 3. The average Pitot pressure at the laser cavity was more than 100 Torr. Backpressure tests were conducted, and the results of these tests revealed that the static pressure in the cavity remains constant at approximately 10 Torr until the supersonic diffuser breaks back and the cavity unstarts at a backpressure of approximately 80 Torr.

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<title>History of chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL) development in the USA</title>

Cited by 13 publications

References 7 publications

The Incredible Rocket-Engine Laser [Scanning Our Past]

The Incredible Rocket-Engine Laser [Scanning Our Past]

Singlet Molecular Oxygen: from COIL Lasers to Photodynamic Cancer Therapy

High-Pressure Nozzle Bank for a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser

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