Experimental study on optical isolation characteristics of SF6 for a high-repetition-rate nanosecond CO2 laser

• DOI: 10.1364/ao.544457
• Publication Date: 2025-02-10T13:00:44Z
• Authors: Ranran Zhang; Yang Gao; Qikun Pan; Chongxiao Zhao; Yiping Zhou; Xiubo Zhang; Jin Guo; Fei Chen; Yiyi Chen; Fei Xu
• Keywords: Nanosecond; Repetition (rhetorical device)

We studied the isolation capability of a flow SF6 gas saturable absorption isolator for a high-repetition-frequency short pulse CO2 small-signal optical noise. The experimental results show that the bottleneck effect of the V-T process limits the high-frequency isolation performance of a static SF6 gas. By optimizing the gas flow velocity, and SF6 and buffer gas pressure, the small-signal isolation degree of the SF6 saturable absorption isolator is 15 dB, the main pulse insertion loss is less than 10%, and the isolation recovery time is about 100 ns.