Two-Stage Radio Frequency Power Generator-Amplifier Design for a TEM00 CO2 Slab Waveguide Laser
This letter presents the results of the research conducted on the design, construction and test of a two stage ra- dio frequency power generator-amplifier directed adapted to an in-house-built compact CO2 waveguide laser. The main characteristic of this power supply lies in the fact its design is based on MOSFET technology for both the oscillator and the amplifier stages. RF output power is centered at 81MHz frequency signal between 100W to 150W. The two-stage sys- tem device has a minimum electric conversion efficiency of 64%. Consequently, the laser head and RF excitation design must have an electrical termination of 50� impedance and the whole system may include a proper matching circuit. The overall test, for the entire system: RF excitation along with our CO2 laser head, is made with a typical gas mixture of CO2- N2-He with proportion of 1:1:3 correspondingly and at a final pressure of 40Torr. Under these specific conditions, a maximum optical output power of 10.7W was obtained for an input feed RF power of 147W. Regarding the optical qual- ity we measured the transverse mode of propagation TEM00 which indicate the entire system work very near the diffrac- tion limit specifications for similar laser systems.
Integral plug-in RF module in a CO2 hybrid-waveguide laser
Abstract This work describes the performance of a compact “in-house built” radio–frequency (RF)-excited CO2 slab waveguide laser which has the innovation of having a plugged-in RF generator–amplifier module directly connected into the positive electrode of the laser head. The design circuit parameters include a matching circuit and a feed-through element as a whole. The overall laser performance takes into account the waveguide dimension (y-axis) as approximately one-tenth of the free space transverse dimension (x-axis). The optical resonator is calculated to be in the regime of the negative branch for unstable confocal resonators, having focal lengths of f 1 = 21.49 cm and f 2 = 19.39 cm with geometrical amplification of 1.108. Optical output coupling mirror was set to ∼9.7%. The calculated waveguide length is 37.73 cm whilst the total resonator length was adjusted to 42 cm to allow coupling losses less than 1%. The laser operational efficiency was about 12% and the output beam quality of 1.13 which is close to the ideal Gaussian beam. The optical output power was accomplished by playing with different gas compositions to have a final optimized gas proportion of 1:1:2.7:0.3 correspondingly to CO2, N2, He and Xe as admixture.
Creating the Virtual Universe
Simulation software is important to our understanding of the universe. The intrinsic multiphysics aspects are spiced with a range of temporal scales and spatial scales, both of which cover more digits than are available in the standard hardware. This, together with the intrinsic chaotic nature of many physical processes, poses quite a challenge. To meet this challenge, researchers developed the Astronomical Multipurpose Environment (AMUSE). Instead of writing a suite of multiphysics solvers from scratch, AMUSE's developers coupled existing solvers for each physical ingredient. The result is a highly inhomogeneous collection of dedicated solvers with a homogeneous protocol that scales to supercomputers.