Helium-neon Lasers | previous | next | feedback |
Helium-neon (HeNe) lasers are a frequently used type of continuously operating gas lasers, most often emitting red light at 632.8 nm at a power level of a few milliwatts and with excellent beam quality. The gain medium is a mixture of helium and neon gas in a glass tube, which normally has a length of the order of 15-50 cm.
Figure 1: Setup of a helium-neon laser.
A DC current, which is applied via two electrodes with a voltage of the order of 1 kV, maintains an electric glow discharge with a moderate current density. A ballast resistor stabilizes the electric current. The current is e.g. 10 mA, leading to an electrical power of the order of 10 W. The glass tube as shown in Figure 1 has Brewster windows, and the laser mirrors must form a laser resonator with a rather small round-trip loss of typically below 1%. Due to the polarization-dependent loss at the Brewster windows, a stable linear polarization is obtained.
Some HeNe lasers have a tube with internal resonator mirrors, which can not be exchanged. Brewster windows are then not required.
In the gas discharge, helium atoms are excited into a metastable state. During collisions, the helium atoms can efficiently transfer energy to neon atoms, which have an excited state with rather similar excitation energy. Neon atoms have quite a few energy levels below that pump level, so that there are several possible laser transitions. The transition at 632.8 nm is most common, but other transitions allow the operation of such lasers at 1.15 μm, 543.5 nm (green), 594 nm (yellow), 612 nm (orange), or 3.39 μm. The emission wavelength is selected by using resonator mirrors which introduce high enough losses at the wavelengths of all competing transitions.
Due to the narrow gain bandwidth, HeNe lasers typically exhibit stable single-frequency operation, even though mode hopping is possible in some temperature ranges where two longitudinal resonator modes have similar gain.
Applications
Helium-neon lasers, particularly the standard devices emitting at 632.8 nm, are often used for alignment and in interferometers, and are competing with laser diodes, which are more compact and efficient, but have less convenient beam profiles.
Some HeNe lasers are serving in optical frequency standards. For example, there are methane-stabilized 3.39-μm HeNe lasers, and 633-nm iodine-stabilized versions.
Bibliography
| [1] | A. Javan, W. R. Bennett Jr., and D. R. Herriott, "Population inversion and continuous optical maser oscillation in a gas discharge containing a He–Ne mixture", Phys. Rev. Lett. 6 (3), 106 (1961) |
| [2] | W. R. Bennett, "Background of an inversion: the first gas laser", IEEE Sel. Topics Quantum Electron. 6 (6), 869 (2000) |
See also: gas lasers, red lasers, visible lasers
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