| 摘要 |
<p>Most gaseous ion lasers run with continuous drive and operate under steady state thermal conditions. They cannot be driven according to the needs of the application, and their kilowatts of waste heat must be removed from the working environment. Michael R. Smith invented a gas laser tube (U.S. 3,626,325), which operates in the repetitively-pulsed mode, and permits "bursts" of pulses that deliver high power from a low average drive level. It features a radiatively cooled discharge tube which moderates one of the debilitating effects of sudden changes in tube drive. The other debilitating effects, not addressed by Smith, are corrected by the present invention. A fast transient effect, ion loss to the wall of the bore, is dealt with by pre-saturating the wall during novel bore-conditioning pulses applied at startup under the control of microcomputer MC. Denser gas is provided during this step, otherwise only small bore tubes could be saturated. Other improvements provide means for overcoming the transient effect of discharge gas pumping. And a thermal thinning of the column gas that remained in the Smith design is avoided by means of a novel gas density regulation. The result is a switched, dynamically operating gas laser, whose drive can follow the peak needs of the application while its waste heat is averaged to a low output level acceptable in the working environment.</p> |
