Demonstration of a diode-pumped plasma jet-type rare gas laser.

The diode-pumped metastable rare gas laser (DPRGL) is showing potential for high-power operation. A key issue in developing this concept is to produce high-density metastables in a large volume. To achieve this goal, we propose a new, to the best of our knowledge, architecture by extracting laser power from a diode-pumped plasma jet. In this scheme, the discharge and gain regions are separated, avoiding the negative effects of discharges in confined regions. A diode-pumped plasma jet-type Ar laser is demonstrated with 466-mW output and 33% slope efficiency. The gain volume can be increased with multi-jets, providing a better scaling potential for the DPRGL system.