A model for the kinetics of a solar-pumped long path laser experiment

Abstract

A kinetic model for a solar-simulator pumped iodine laser system is developed and compared to an experiment in which the solar simulator output is dispersed over a large active volume (150 cu cm) with low simulator light intensity (approx. 200 solar constants). A trace foreign gas which quenches the upper level is introduced into the model. Furthermore, a constant representing optical absorption of the stimulated emission is introduced, in addition to a constant representing the scattering at each of the mirrors, via the optical cavity time constant. The non-uniform heating of the gas is treated as well as the pressure change as a function of time within the cavity. With these new phenomena introduced into the kinetic model, a best reasonable fit to the experimental data is found by adjusting the reaction rate coefficients within the range of known uncertainty by numerical methods giving a new bound within this range of uncertainty. The experimental parameters modeled are the lasing time, laser pulse energy, and time to laser threshold