Laser glasses, activators

Rare earth elements serve as activators in laser glasses. Well-known is the neodymium laser. 

In a solid state laser, the active species is distributed throughout a solid, usually crystalline, material, although glass can also be used as a host. The lasers are robust and frequently tunable, though heat dissipation can sometimes be an issue. Certain types of solid state crystals, for example neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Nd YAG), can be pumped by diode lasers instead of by other lasers or by flashlamps, which is often the case for other materials. Such diode-pumped, solid state systems are reliable, economical, compact, and easy to operate—in fact, many commercial systems are turnkey, needing only to be plugged in and turned on to operate. 

P. Heinz, M. Fickenscher, A. Lauberau, Electro-optic gain control and cavity dumping of a Nd glass laser with active passive mode-locking. Opt. Commun. 62,343 (1987)... 

Fig. 4.56. Schematic diagram of a SERS-active substrate and the measurement arrangement. Alumina nanoparticles are deposited on a glass surface and produce the required roughness. A thin silver layer is evaporated on to the nanoparticles and serves for the enhancement. Organic molecules adsorbed on the silver surface can be detected by irradiation with a laser and collecting the Raman scattered light.

The term solid-state laser refers to lasers that use solids as their active medium. However, two kinds of materials are required a host crystal and an impurity dopant. The dopant is selected for its ability to form a population inversion. The Nd YAG laser, for example, uses a small number of neodymium ions as a dopant in the solid YAG (yttrium-aluminum-gar-net) crystal. Solid-state lasers are pumped with an outside source such as a flash lamp, arc lamp, or another laser. This energy is then absorbed by the dopant, raising the atoms to an excited state. Solid-state lasers are sought after because the active medium is relatively easy to handle and store. Also, because the wavelength they produce is within the transmission range of glass, they can be used with fiber optics. 

Solid-state lasers using substitutional neodymium (Nd3+ ions) as the active defects are widely available. Practical lasers contain about 1% Nd3+ dopant. The most common host materials are glass, yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG), Y3A15012, and calcium tungstate, CaW04. In the crystalline host structures, the defects responsible for amplification are NdY and Ndca-... 

The titanosilicate version of UTD-1 has been shown to be an effective catalyst for the oxidation of alkanes, alkenes, and alcohols (77-79) by using peroxides as the oxidant. The large pores of Ti-UTD-1 readily accommodate large molecules such as 2,6-di-ferf-butylphenol (2,6-DTBP). The bulky 2,6-DTBP substrate can be converted to the corresponding quinone with activity and selectivity comparable to the mesoporous catalysts Ti-MCM-41 and Ti-HMS (80), where HMS = hexagonal mesoporous silica. Both Ti-UTD-1 and UTD-1 have also been prepared as oriented thin films via a laser ablation technique (81-85). Continuous UTD-1 membranes with the channels oriented normal to the substrate surface have been employed in a catalytic oxidation-separation process (82). At room temperature, a cyclohexene-ferf-butylhydroperoxide was passed through the membrane and epoxidation products were trapped on the down stream side. The UTD-1 membranes supported on metal frits have also been evaluated for the separation of linear paraffins and aromatics (83). In a model separation of n-hexane and toluene, enhanced permeation of the linear alkane was observed. Oriented UTD-1 films have also been evenly coated on small 3D objects such as glass and metal beads (84, 85). 

Most of the solid-state lasers employ as active material crystals or glasses doped with rare-earth or actinide ions, because these ions exhibit a large number of relatively sharp fluorescent lines, covering the whole visible and near-infrared spectrum 380) search for new laser materials and investigations of the characteristics of laser emission at different temperatures of the active material and with various pump sources have improved knowledge about the solid state spectra and radiationless transitions in laser media 38i). 

To explain this application, we consider the schematic drawing of a giant pulse laser, shown in Fig. 7. Such a laser consists essentially of (1) a rod of active material AM (for example a ruby or neodymium glass or neodymium-doped rod of yttrium-aluminum garnet) excited by the light pulse from a flashlamp F,... 

These are some of the most important lasers used in photochemical research. As they are rather similar only the ruby laser is described here in detail. The active material of the ruby laser is a dispersion of Cr3+ ions in alumina, A1203, in the form of a glass rod. This is in fact a synthetic ruby , not the natural half-precious stone which would not have the required degree of purity the details of the synthetic process are outside the scope of this book. 

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