Experimental study on optical isolation characteristics of SF₆ for a high-repetition-rate nanosecond CO₂ laser

We studied the isolation capability of a flow SF₆ gas saturable absorption isolator for a high-repetition-frequency short pulse CO₂ small-signal optical noise. The experimental results show that the bottleneck effect of the V-T process limits the high-frequency isolation performance of a static SF₆ gas. By optimizing the gas flow velocity, and SF₆ and buffer gas pressure, the small-signal isolation degree of the SF₆ saturable absorption isolator is 15 dB, the main pulse insertion loss is less than 10%, and the isolation recovery time is about 100 ns.