Excitation of Copper Vapor Lasers by Storage Capacitor Direct Discharge via High-Speed Photothyristors

The possibility of using a "pulsed fiber laser–photothyristor" optocoupler as a switch in the excitation schemes of copper vapor lasers (CVLs) has been investigated. It has been shown that such a switch has a nanosecond performance and is able to form monopolar and alternating current pulses through CVLs with a power of up to 10 MW and a repetition rate of tens of kilohertz when an electrical efficiency of the excitation circuit is more than 95%. A simple but very accurate model of a photothyristor is proposed, which can be used in full-scale CVL modeling programs.