Experimental study of the effects of gas pressure and resonator length on the CO2 laser pulse shape

In this paper, the effect of various parameters on the pulse shape of the CO2 laser has been investigated. For this purpose, various parameters such as gas pressure and the length of the resonator were changed and the laser pulses shapes in each case along with their energy have been recorded. The results show that the output energy increases sharply with increasing gas pressure, so that when the pressure increases by factors of 2 and 3, the output energy increases by factors of 3 and 5 while the pulses duration reaches 0.5 and 0.3 and their buildup time reaches 0.9 and 0.7 of the initial values. In addition, by increasing the oscillator length, the width of the spike and especially of the tail parts of the pulses decease. To perform this series of experiments, a home-made laser with 1-3 atm operational pressure has been used