Beam quality improvement of a copper vapor laser by long pulse excitation and injection locking.

Laser oscillations with nearly diffraction limited output beam of a copper vapor laser (CVL) were investigated.The beam divergence less than 0.3 mrad in the pulse duration of 75ns was attained by the long pulse excitation.Also , good beam quality in the whole pulse duration was obtained by the injection locking, with the threshold injection power of only 0.1 W. The CVL beam quality has been successfully established for the master oscillator power amplifier.