NUMERICAL STUDY OF RADIATIVE TRANSPORT HYDRODYNAMICS, AND CHEMICAL KINETICS IN A PHOTODISSOCIATION ATOMIC IODINE AMPLIFIER

Abstract

Index-of-refraction changes induced by hydrodynamic activity have been blamed for poor beam quality in photodissociation lasers. Until recently, the pump field, hydrodynamics, chemical kinetics, and the losing field have been decoupled in theoretical models because of the wide range of time scales on which they act. Although these mechanisms occur at varying time scales ranging over seven orders of magnitude (subnanosecond to milliseconds), each mechanism strongly affects the others. In this paper we present a model that first couples the pump field, chemical kinetics, and hydrodynamics in the form of implicit and explicit finite-difference equations. We then couple in the laser field to show that index-of-refraction changes induced by radiative transfer degrade peak beam intensity