Laser with an unstable resonator for annular active media

摘要

Lasers are described having unstable resonators which effectively exploit annular media, independently of whether solid, liquid or gaseous media are involved. The invention is distinguished in that extraction of the beam (5.1) is provided, from a ring resonator along a gap or from an annulus over the entire circumference, the laser resonator being formed by ring mirrors (1, 2) having toroidal mirror surfaces and being bounded by the walls of the ring gap for exciting the medium or by the cylindrical inner and outer wall (3, 4) of the excited medium, and the gap for extracting the beam from the resonator being formed, on the one hand, by the edge of a ring mirror having toroidal mirror surface and, on the other hand, by a boundary of the medium or by a ring diaphragm, and the laser radiation (5. 1) being combined to form a beam (5. 2), the diameter of which is comparable with a conventional laser, outside the unstable resonator. IMAGE