High Efficient, Intense and Compact Pulsed D2O Terahertz Laser Pumped With a TEA CO2 Laser

A high efficient, intense and compact pulsed D₂O terahertz laser is presented, which is pumped by a multi-transverse mode TEA CO₂ laser. For D₂O gas as the active medium, with the cavity length of 120 cm, pulse energy of the THz laser has been investigated as the variation of pump energy and gas pressure. When the pump energy was 1.41 J, the maximum single pulse energy of 6.2 mJ was achieved at the wavelength of 385 μm. Photon conversion efficiency as high as 36.5% was obtained when laser operated at the maximum output energy. As the pump energy was raised from 0.57 to 1.41 J, the optimum pressure was slightly changed from 400 to 700 Pa. The THz pulse consisted of a spike pulse with pulse width of 120 ns and a tail pulse with pulse width of about 170 ns. The peak power of the spike pulse is about 44.3 kW. Comparing with the occurring time and pulse width of pump pulse, 70 ns delay and 10ns broadening were observed in the THz spike pulse.