Improvements to a home-built nitrogen laser

Several major design improvements to a previously described nitrogen laser are presented. The active region has a larger cross section but shorter length resulting in an output beam of better optical quality and a laser channel which is cheaper and easier to build. The gas flow is transverse to the channel, and the pressure is more uniform. These and other improvements result in a 9-nsec pulse FWHM (full width at half-maximum) whose peak power exceeds 0.7 MW when the laser is supplied with 24 kV and pulsed at 10 Hz.