Crystalline Lasers: Physical Processes and Operating Schemes

By the end of the 1970s, crystalline lasers were widely used in science, engineering, medicine, and technology. The types of lasers used have continued to grow in number to include newly discovered crystalline hosts, previously known compounds generating at other spectral wavelengths, and broadband tunable stimulated emission. This has led to the creation of an extremely promising new generation of crystalline lasers that are both highly efficient and more reliable. The major part of this book is devoted to describing multilevel operating laser schemes for stimulated emission excitation in insulating crystals doped with lanthanide ions. The first part of Crystalline Lasers deals with the history of the physics and spectroscopy of insulating laser crystals. The chapters in the second part of the book present results from the study of Stark-energy levels of generating ions in laser crystals and their radiative and nonradiative intermanifold transition characteristics. This section includes extensive tabular data and reference information. Popular and novel operating schemes of crystalline lasers are covered in Part 3. In the chapters in the fourth part of the book, the newest technologies in the physics and engineering of crystalline lasers are considered. The results of investigations into laser action under selective excitations, miniature crystalline lasers, and the properties of nonlinear activated laser crystals are presented and analyzed. Crystalline Lasers summarizes and reviews the results of many years of research and studies of activator ions and multilevel operating laser schemes, and discusses exciting prospects of using these systems to create new types of crystalline lasers. This book will be of use to laser scientists and engineers, physicists, and chemical engineers.

Alexander A. Kaminskii received his first (PhD) and second doctor degrees and a full professor diploma in solid-state physics from the Institute of Crystallography of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1965, 1974 and 1981, respectively. Three years prior to and after graduation he worked as a junior scientist on the development of long-wave ruby lasers in the physics department of Moscow State University. In 1961 he joined the quantum electronics laboratory at the Nuclear Physics Institute of Moscow State University headed by Nobel Prize Laureate Professor Alexander M. Prokhorov. Here he began his long and continued basic research on the physics and spectroscopy of rare-earth doped insulating laser crystals. In 1965 he joined the Institute of Crystallography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he is currently head of the laser crystal physics laboratory. Dr. Kaminskii’s main interests have been concentrated on the search for and the investigation of new generating compounds and the development of new principles and operating schemes for crystalline lasers. He has discovered stimulated emission in more than one-half of all known laser crystals. Among these are many of the more commonly used laser crystals, numerous garnets, disordered fluoride and oxide compounds, families of praseodymium and ytterbium crystals, and several nonlinear compounds for self-frequency doubled and self-stimulated Raman scattering lasers. He has also proposed and developed many new operating schemes for crystalline lasers. Dr. Kaminskii introduced the physical background and pioneered the technique of stimlated-emission spectroscopy of activated crystals. He has authored more than 500 scientific publications on these subjects, including more than 40 review articles and 4 monographs. In 1993 Dr. Kaminskii was the recipient of the Rozhdestvensky Award in optics from the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1994 he received research prizes for senior scientists in solid-state physics and crystalline lasers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany and from the Japapanese Institute for Promising Investigation. In 1994 he was also appointed as a Director of the Joint Open Laboratory for laser crystals and precise laser systems under the auspices of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Among other activities Dr. Kaminskii has presented many invited lectures and seminars on the physics and spectroscopy of laser crystals at universities and scientific centers worldwide. He has been a member of the organizing committees of numerous Russian and international conferences. Dr. Kaminskii is currently a member of the editorial board for the journals Physica Status Solidi (Germany), Material Science (Poland), and Quantum Electronics (Russia). He is also a member of the Scientific Council on Luminescence of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Optical Society of America, and the European Rare-Earth and Actinide Society, and a corresponding member of the Ettore Majorana International Center for Scientific Culture in Erice (Italy).