Development Of Micro-miniature And High-power Hard Glass Wave-guide CO₂ Laser

CO₂ laser, as one of the main embranchment of gas laser, is widely implemented in industry and agriculture production, national defence, scientific research, medicinal area, such as metrology, material processing, laser medical treatment, laser communications, and energy resource developing, etc.For a long time, the research about all kinds of CO₂ lasers is extremely active. Now CO₂ lasers can be divided into axial sealed-off lasers, axial flowing lasers, transverse flowing lasers, transverse excited high-pressure lasers, wave-guide CO₂ lasers and RF-excited lasers according the structure of lasers. Wave-guide CO₂ laser is one of the most typical lasers, and developed in accordance with the requirement of miniaturization. Now scientists all over the world are working hard to find the best structure, perfect wave-guide material and discharge stimulating means for CO₂ lasers miniaturization. Till now there have been about 10 type structures for wave-guide CO₂ lasers, and many kinds of wave-guide material including ceramic material, ceramic metal, all-metal and hard glass, and so on. Compared with other wave-guide material, glass is not so good on the thermal conduction, and its transmission loss is bigger, but it is easy for processing, especially the wave-guide surface can have much higher degree of finish. The most important is that glass is much cheaper than other material, so hard glass wave-guide CO₂ lasers still has great utility value. Micro-miniature and high-powered hard glass wave-guide two-channel CO₂ lasers has bright prospect of utilization in medical and micro-miniature manufacturing. There have been some articles in the magazines both here and abroad, and this article will focus on following topics:...