ABSTRACT
Large financial and material resources were spent on the research and development of effective copper vapour lasers (CVL). CVL was used as an image brightness amplifier. For ‘clean’ CVLs, many problems related to the longevity and stability of the parameters has already been successfully solved. The efficiency in industrial ‘clean’ CVLs is 0.5-1%, and the average power output from one active element (AE) has reached the level of 500-750 W. The design of the AE of the CVL and gold vapour lasers is a quartz tube as an external vacuum-tight shell, inside of which a ceramic discharge channel made of beryllium oxide or alumina is coaxially installed. The main field of application of pulsed CVLs with radiation in the visible range is precision microprocessing of materials for electronics, accurate instrumentation. Ways are being considered to increase the efficiency of CVL and the quality of its output radiation beam by using new configurations of optical systems.
