Physics professor quoted in article
Physics associate professor Dr. Kristan Corwin was quoted in an article entitled “Looking back/Looking forward: Gas lasers: Durable survivors evolve new forms" for LaserFocusWorld.
The article discusses the past, present and future prospects of gas lasers. Kristan commented on using gas-filled hollow-core fibers as a laser medium.
An excerpt is below.
The concept grew from earlier studies of optical pumping and the use of gas-filled hollow fibers as optical frequency references, says Kristan Corwin of Kansas State University (Manhattan, KS). She, Brian Washburn of Kansas State, and Wolfgang Rudolph of the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque) led the team that demonstrated the first hollow-core fiber gas laser, exciting 3 μm lasing from acetylene (C2H2) with 1.5 μm pulses.1
"It's fun to have a new laser system to play around with," says Corwin. "Gain was so high in acetylene that we could observe lasing, despite the fiber's loss of 20 decibels/meter at 3 micron." Then Fetah Benabid, now at the Xlim Research Institute at the University of Limoges (France) developed the hypocycloid core fiber (see Fig. 5), which reduces loss at 3 μm by keeping most of the light in the gas.
The full article can be viewed here.