Stimulated emission kinetics of an N2 laser under pulseperiodic conditions. I. Theory
An analysis is made of a theoretical model of the mechanism for the drop in the stimulated emission pulse power of a nitrogen laser at high pump pulse repetition frequencies. It is shown that the output power drop is cause by a decrease in the gain of the lasing transition. The dependence of the gain on the discharge plasma parameters (the vibrational and translational temperatures, and the density of the N2 molecules in the ground electronic state) is determined and estimates are made of the range of variation of these parameters for a sealed longitudinally pumped N2 laser. It is shown that relaxation of the vibrationally excited nitrogen atoms should play a major part in the mechanism under study.