This paper presents a purification process of hydrogen bromide (HBr) gas by fractional distillation technique and its use for performance enhancement of copper-HBr laser (Cu-HBrL). The residual impurities in HBr were suppressed by a two-step distillation process at temperatures of −196°C and −20°C. The lowering of the impurities was confirmed by comparing the mass spectrograph of the HBr gas before and after distillation, using a quadrupole mass spectrometer. The effect of the purified HBr gas on the performance of Cu-HBrL average output power as well its electrical discharge characteristics were studied. More than 37% improvement in the laser average output power (40 to 55 W) was observed with the use of this distilled HBr gas compared to undistilled gas. The underlying mechanism of the enhancement was analyzed by comparing electrical discharge characteristics in the two cases. The improvement in Cu-HBrL performance with distilled HBr gas was attributed to lowering of bromine and hydrogen concentration, mainly manifested as increased average electrical energy coupling to the discharge. This resulted in increased laser gain as well as gain volume, which were reflected in increases in laser output power and beam diameter.
This paper presents a comparative study on thermal lensing characteristics of a low temperature copper vapor laser (CVL) (LT-CVL as Copper-HBr laser) and a high temperature CVL (HT-CVL as elemental CVL). Interferometric techniques were used to study the combined thermal lens power of active gaseous medium and discharge sealing optical windows as well as that of the optical windows separately at different electrical input powers. As the input power varied from 2.7 to 4.6 kW, the combined thermal lens power varied from −1.4 to +0.94 km−1 for LT-CVL and from +1.4 to +13 km−1 for HT-CVL. The thermal lens power of the windows varied from +3 to +15 km−1 for HT-CVL. On the other hand, for LT-CVL, the thermal lens due to windows was very weak and could not be measured. It was observed that the origin of net thermal lensing mostly resides in the discharge tube windows owing to its higher temperature variation of refractive index as compared to that of gaseous active medium. The weaker thermal lens characteristics of an LT-CVL was attributed to its much lower working temperature and relatively flatter radial gas temperature profile than that of an HT-CVL.
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