Operation of the atomic xenon laser near 4μm

A series of experiments was conducted to investigate the spontaneous emission spectrum from a variety of laser gas mixtures, over a range of radiofrequency discharge excitation conditions in a planar waveguide configuration of volume of 386mm × 30mm × 1.5mm. The discharge was created using a 49MHz power generator and a ?-type matching circuit, while the gas mixture consisted or argon, helium, krypton neon and xenon in different proportions at a total pressure of about 100Torr. For these experiments, the resonator mirrors were removed. Results obtained clearly indicate the possibility of obtaining a number of wavelengths near 4.0 µm if lines below 3.51 µm are suppressed. Using a hybrid waveguide-unstable resonator, the laser spectrum showed 4 lines near 4µm, with laser power, of hundreds of milliwatts.