Neodymium glass laser

Neodymium and YAG Lasers. The principle of neodymium and YAG lasers is very similar to that of the ruby laser. Neodymium ions (Nd +) are used in place of Cr + and are often distributed in glass rather than in alumina. The light from the neodymium laser has a wavelength of 1060 nm (1.06 xm) it emits in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Yttrium (Y) ions in alumina (A) compose a form of the naturally occurring garnet (G), hence the name, YAG laser. Like the ruby laser, the Nd and YAG lasers operate from three- and four-level excited-state processes. 

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,... 

Vollrath [132] and L Ast [102] reported the behavior of primary explosives with a pulsed-neodymium-glass (10,600 laser of 100 MW, emitting 30-nsee flashes. With a maximum energy of 3 J, diazodinitrophenol burned and potas-sium dinitrobenzofuroxan deflagrated or detonated. Lead and cadmium azides and lead styphnate gave consistent results ... 

The first LPy-GC experiments were conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s on polymeric materials [85, 87—89]. The interaction of a laser beam with a substance is shown schematically in Fig. 3.7 [86]. A laser (e.g., ruby- or neodymium-glass) beam is focused and injected into the sample. The pulse duration is usually about 0.001 sec and the beam energy is about 5 J per pulse [85]. If this energy is focused on a spot... 

With the discovery of the laser, it has been possible to irradiate materials with intense monochromatic light. Brish et al. [86] were the first to show that an intense infrared beam (X= 1060 nm) of light from a neodymium-glass laser could initiate lead azide. A point to be noted is that the wavelength of the light beam is far from the absorption edge of lead azide [2]. The Q-switched beam was 15 mm diam, was unfocused, and had a duration of 0.1 /isec. Lead azide of... 

National Laboratory, for thermonuclear fusion in carefully prepared DT (deuterium-tritium) pellets, were huge neodymium glass lasers using the transition from the fourth excited /-level Tj/j to the first excited /-level Since... 

All glass lasers developed to date have used a rare earth as the active ion and optical pumping for excitation (Stokowski, 1982). Of these, flash-lamp-pumped neodymium glass lasers are the most frequently used and the most widely investigated. The spectroscopic data needed for estimation of the laser characteristics are usually obtained from small samples (Reisfeld and Jprgensen, 1977). The data include absorption, emission, nonradiative relaxation, energy transfer probabilities and laser cross sections. Laser operation predictions can be made from such data without actually demonstrating laser action. 

This is in contrast to lasers based on mby or neodymium in glass, which operate at much lower pulse-repetition rates. Nd YAG lasers are often operated as frequency-doubled devices so that the output is at 532 nm. These lasers are the most common type of soHd-state laser and have dominated sohd-state laser technology since the early 1970s. Nd YAG lasers having continuous output power up to 1800 W are available, but output powers of a few tens of watts are much more common. 

---