Stable pulses of variable width from a mode-locked hybrid TEA-CO2 laser

A new technique for increasing the stability of mode-locked pulses from a TEA-CO2 laser is reported. It consists essentially in the mode locking of a hybrid laser. Moreover, with the low-pressure CW gain cell operating, the pulsewidth varies as alpha to the minus 1.1, where alpha is the modulation parameter, in contrast to the alpha to the minus 0.5 dependence without the CW gain module. This permits easy tuning of the pulse width between 1.8 and 10 nsec. A model is presented that agrees well with our experimental results.