TEA laser

In 1963, C. Kumar N. Patel, working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, first demonstrated laser output at 10.6 μm from a low pressure RF-excited CO2 gas discharge.

His solution to the problem of arc formation was to have a conducting bar facing a linear array of pins with a separation of a few centimetres.

A fast discharge capacitor rapidly switched across the laser electrodes using a spark gap or thyratron provided the high voltage pulses.

They could produce MW peak powers of a few 100 ns duration capable of breaking down air if brought to a focus with a short focal-length lens.

The first true (non pin-bar) TEA laser was realized by Pearson and Lamberton working at the UK MOD Services Electronic Research Laboratory at Baldock.

Their double-discharged[clarification needed] design coupled part of the discharge energy to a thin wire running parallel to, and offset from, one side of the electrodes.

These included dielectrically isolated wires and electrodes, sliding spark arrays, electron beams and pins impedance-loaded with capacitors.

The original Pearson-Lamberton TEA laser could be operated at around one pulse per second when switched with a spark gap discharging a capacitor resistively charged from a DC power supply.

By circulating the gas between the electrodes, which was using lossless capacitor charging and replacing the spark-gap with a thyratron, repetition rates in excess of a thousand pulses per second were subsequently achieved with various designs of TEA laser.

The double-discharge method required to initiate stable high-pressure gas discharges can be used both below and above atmospheric pressure, and these devices too can be referred to as TEA lasers.