Discharge and kinetics modeling in electron-beam controlled CO2 laser amplifiers

The specific computational methods used to model the spatial and temporal behavior of large pulsed electron-beam controlled CO2 laser amplifiers are presented. The interactions between the various physical processes which occur in these devices are related to the logical structure of the model, so that the key approximations can be identified. It is shown that, in most cases, the uniformity of the gain can be adequately described with a two-dimensional (2-D) analysis, which uses the discharge conditions present at a single snapshot time corresponding to the peak of the discharge power. These techniques are applied to model an experiment in which the nonuniformities play an important role; and, as a second example, it is demonstrated that the modeling capabilities can show the consequences of design modifications in large-aperture amplifiers