Preliminary Study On Iodine Plasma Laser Generation

The iodine laser has good application prospect in national defence and civil area. However, at present, the iodine laser was pumped by chemical energy, which will easily produce toxic material, moreover, the iodine laser's cubage was very large and its running time was very short. These disadvantages limit the application of the iodine laser. Three body recombination of iodine laser produced by iodine plasma was proposed in the paper. The preliminary study of iodine laser producing by laser excites iodine plasma was done theoretically and experimentally in this paper.Theoretically, the two-temperature plasma numerical simulation program was compiled. The iodine plasmas which is generated by using a single longitudinal mode second-harmonic Nd:YAG laser(532nm) are calculated by the simulation program. We get many plasma parameters in different laser intensity, such as plasma intensity, ablative pressure, electron temperature and average degree of ionization. Meanwhile, the potential curves of ground state and several low excited states of iodine molecule are separately calculated by UHF and CIS with 3-21G** basis sets. The potential curves are used to calculate bond dissociation energy of iodine molecule. Many atomic parameters of iodine plasma system are also computed with Cowan physics code, such as the energy level, oscillator strength, spontaneous decay rates and spectrum.Experimentally, different energies are employed to pumped solid iodine to obtain iodine plasma. Femotosecond laser as a probe optical pulse with Mach-Zehnder interferometer are used to diagnose the electron density of iodine plasma. Interference pattern of iodine plasma is detected by CCD. The iodine plasma which is generated by using a single longitudinal mode second-harmonic Nd:YAG laser(532nm) and kHz femotosecond laser as the pump source is detected by spectrometer to obtain its fluorescence emission spectrum. As a result, the iodine plasma laser 1.315μm is probably come true.These results of theory and experiment can be employed in the further study of the miniaturization new iodine plasma laser.