Excitation mechanisms in CW He-Hg lasers

The collision processes responsible for populating and de-populating upper and lower levels of the cw He-Hg ion laser are investigated using flowing afterglow techniques. It is shown that the superior performance of the laser at 6150 Å compared to that at 7945 Å is not due to a difference in excitation mechanism — both are excited by charge transfer from He⁺ — but instead reflects a greater effectiveness of second kind collisions of electrons in depopulating the 7p²P_{$\text{1}\text{2}$} upper level of the 7945 Å transition. The charge transfer, excitation rate constants for several Hg II levels are compared, and values for the rate constant for the electron collision de-excitation process are deduced.     

High average power,all-solid-state external resonator Raman laser

As much as 3 W of average power at 1064 nm from a diode-pumped Nd:YAG laser, Q switched at 4 kHz, was used to pump an external-resonator, crystalline Ba(NO3)2 Raman laser generating a maximum of 1.3-W output at the first Stokes wavelength of 1197 nm. The slope efficiency was 63% with respect to the fundamental power incident on the Ba(NO3)2 crystal. A reduction in the beam quality of the Stokes output from M2 approximately 1.4 at lower Stokes powers to M2 approximately 3.4 at higher powers is attributed to thermal loading of the Raman-active crystal.     

Highly stable ECL active films formed by the electrografting of a diazotized ruthenium complex generated in situ from the amine

The electrodeposition of the electrochemiluminescent (ECL) ruthenium complex, bis(2,2'-bipyridyl)(4'-(4-aminophenyl)-2,2'-bipyridyl)ruthenium(II), [Ru(bpy)(2)(apb)](2+), via the in situ formation of a diazonium species from aqueous media is reported. Surface characterization undertaken using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) determined that the layer is bound to the substrate via azo bonding. The layer displays good ECL activity and is stable over a long period of time. The excellent potential of this system for ECL sensing applications is demonstrated using the well-known ECL coreactant 2-(dibutylamino)ethanol (DBAE) as a model analyte, which can be detected to a level of 10 nM with a linear range between 10(-8) and 10(-4) M.     

Conjugation effects of various linkers on Gd(III) MRI contrast agents with dendrimers: optimizing the hydroxypyridinonate (HOPO) ligands with nontoxic, degradable esteramide (EA) dendrimers for high relaxivity

One essential requirement for more sensitive gadolinium-based MRI contrast agents is to slow the molecular tumbling of the gadolinium(III) ion, which increases the gadolinium's relaxivity (i.e., its ability to speed up the NMR relaxation of nearby water molecules). One route to this is through conjugation to high-molecular-weight polymers such as dendrimers. In this work, amine-functionalized TREN-bis(1,2-HOPO)-TAM-ethylamine and TREN-bis(1-Me-3,2-HOPO)-TAM-ethylamine ligands have been synthesized and attached to biocompatible 40 kDa esteramide (EA)- and poly-l-lysine (PLL)-based dendrimers capable of binding up to eight gadolinium complexes. These conjugates have T(1) relaxivities of up to 38.14 ± 0.02 mM(-1) s(-1) per gadolinium at 37 °C, corresponding to relaxivities of up to 228 mM(-1) s(-1) per dendrimer molecule. This relaxivity expressed on a "per Gd" basis is several times that of the small-molecule complexes and an order of magnitude higher than that of current commercial agents. Because of their high performance and low toxicity, these macromolecules may constitute an attractive complement to currently available gadolinium(III)-based contrast agents.     

Characteristics of copper HyBrID-type lasers which use HCl reactive gas

We have investigated the output behaviour of a low temperature HyBrID-type copper laser operating with a flowing Ne–HCl reactive gas mixture. 15.5 W of average power was observed from a 19 mm bore device at 23 kHz PRF corresponding to a specific output power of 78 mW/cm3. The output power was 20–30% lower than that of the same device operating with an Ne–HBr mixture; however, it markedly exceeds the output of similar sized elemental copper vapour lasers (with or without hydrogen additive). This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Investigation of practical high repetition rate copper vapour lasers with external heating

The characteristics of high repetition rate CVL devices incorporating passive external heating have been investigated. Pre-heating of the CVL plasma tube using external heating has been shown to significantly reduce CVL warm-up time, while supplementary heating of the CVL plasma tube using external heating allows efficient CVL operation with reduced discharge power input without any degradation in output power.     

Directly written monolithic waveguide laser incorporating a distributed feedback waveguide-Bragg grating

We report the fabrication and performance of the first C-band directly written monolithic waveguide laser (WGL). The WGL device was created in an erbium- and ytterbium-doped phosphate glass host and consisted of an optical waveguide that included a distributed feedback Bragg grating structure. The femtosecond laser direct-write technique was used to create both the waveguide and the waveguide-Bragg grating simultaneously and in a single processing step. The waveguide laser was optically pumped at approximately 980 nm and lased at 1,537 nm with a bandwidth of less than 4 pm.