Space Laser Design.

Abstract

Conductive cooling of a Nd:YAG laser crystal is realized by cradling the silvercoated rod in a copper heat sink. Pump radiation illuminates the rod from the side through a window in the solid housing; and as a result, the entering pump radiation is efficiently trapped in the weakly absorbing laser crystal. Two cavities, both employing 'cold' mirrors to filter the pump radiation, were designed to pump the narrow side aperture. A non-imaging design, employing flat dielectric mirrors, proved less efficient than a hybrid imaging design which employed a combination of elliptical and circular cylindrical dielectric mirrors to efficiently pump the conductively cooled laser. The latter cavity delivered 1.5 W of multimode laser power when pumped with 300 W from a K-Rb lamp. (Author)

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 1972
Accession Number
AD0907100

Entities

People

  • James T. Flynn
  • Robert J. Mongeon

Organizations

  • United Technologies Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Electromagnetic Radiation
  • Heat Sinks
  • Lasers
  • Light (Electromagnetic Radiation)
  • Multimode
  • Optical Phenomena
  • Radiation
  • Yag Lasers

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Combustion and Flow Dynamics.
  • Optical Physics and Photonics.

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy
  • Directed Energy - Lasers
  • Space
  • Space - Hall-Effect Thruster