Discharge-driven electric oxygen-iodine laser superlinear enhancement via increasing g0L

The authors report the development of an electric oxygen-iodine laser with higher output using a larger product of gain and gain length, g0L. A factor of 4.4 increase in laser power output on the 1315 nm atomic iodine transition was achieved with a factor of 3 increase in gain length. I(2P1/2) is pumped using energy transferred from O2(a1Δ) produced by flowing a gas mixture of O2-He-NO through three coaxial geometry radio-frequency discharges. Continuous wave (CW) average total laser power of 481 W was extracted with g0L=0.042.