Magnetic pulse compression for a copper vapour laser

Abstract

A copper vapour laser (CVL) has been successfully operated with a magnetic pulse compression (MPC) driver. With the MPC circuit the laser output power is increased, and stresses on the thyratron are reduced leading to an increased tube life. A theoretical analysis of the MPC is presented and compared with experimental results.

Methane Conversion to Hydrogen and Higher Hydrocarbons by Double Pulsed Glow Discharge

“…To minimize the overall energy loss, another alternative for pulse generation could be resonance charging circuit that has been widely used in other places such as metal vapor lasers. (32)(33)(34) The resonance charging circuit not only doubles the voltage across the bank capacitors, but also it replaces all resistors by inductors and eliminates the second switching device, which are the sources of energy loss. In addition, it allows the operation at higher repetition rates where the energy consumption is expected to be further lowered.…”

A 100 W, near diffraction limited, copper HyBrID laser oscillator

“…The high-voltage excitation pulse circuitry was based on an ITT F-162 thyratron (water-cooled anode type) and operated in a manner similar to the CVL pulse compression circuit described in [13]. Referring to figure 1, the storage capacitors C1 and C2 (both 2.3 nF under standard operating conditions) are resonantly charged through D1, L1, L2 and L3 and D1, L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5 respectively.…”

“…This limitation has been successfully overcome in ECVLs (and other types of gas laser) by using magnetic pulse compression (MPC) to protect thyratrons from damage, chiefly by reducing both the peak thyratron current and the initial rate of increase of thyratron current (see e.g. [13]) whilst enabling the rapid transfer of energy into the discharge tube required for efficient upper laser level excitation. The performance of MPC excitation circuits in copper HyBrID lasers, which have notably different discharge impedance characteristics to ECVLs [14],…”

New multiplexed all solid state pulser for high power wide aperture kinetically enhanced copper vapor laser

“…[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] To the best of our knowledge, there has not been any report on simplified all solid state pulser configurations (without thyratron) used in 100 W class of high power KE-CVLs. Use of a very high power (77 kW, wall plug) solid state pulser was, however, reported for a 312 W, large (15.2 l) volume KE-CVL with about 26 kW input power to the laser load and 1.2% laser tube efficiency.…”