Abstract

Recently, optical pumping has been used to produce cw operation of a line-tunable NH₃ laser in the 12-μm region.¹ Acoustooptic modulators were employed to downshift CO₂ radiation into exact coincidence with the NH₃ sR(5,0) transition. This downshifted radiation is a very efficient optical pump of NH₃–N₂ mixtures. In previous work, lasing was achieved on twenty lines in ortho-NH₃, with maximum output powers of 0.7 W and wavelengths ranging from 10.7 to 13.2μm. We describe an improved line-tunable NH₃ laser with cw output powers as high as 5.5 W. The pumping technique has been extended to include para-NH₃ transitions, and a total of sixty-five different laser transitions, with wavelengths from 10.3 to 13.8μm, has been observed in ¹⁴NH₃.

© 1986 Optical Society of America