Abstract
We proposed and tested a nitrogen laser pumped by an excitation circuit which were pulse-charged through a step-up transformer. The laser gas works as a closing switch element. Since the primary circuit branch is operated in low voltage, solid state switch devices instead of high voltage gap switches are applicable. The nitrogen laser of 30 cm tube length had the peak output power when the gas pressure was 70 Torr. A uniform discharge across the aluminum electrodes was established by using an auxiliary discharge preionization. In order to obtain the output characteristics under various conditions, a set of the circuit, equations and the rate equations based on the saturation approximation was solved numerically by the Runge-Kutta method. The computed results agreed well with the experimental results.
