Brief Description of Liquid Lasers
Brief Description: (Liquid Lasers)
Due to their homogeneous properties and a very high optical cavity of liquids, these are also used as active materials in lasers. Liquid lasers are four-level lasers that use liquids as active material or lasing medium. In these lasers, laser tubes are filled with liquid instead of
laser rods as in solid-state lasers or gas in gas lasers. Liquid laser medium has some advantages like very high gain, no cracking for high output power, feasibility of cooling the liquid by circulation, narrow frequency spectrum, etc. In liquid lasers, optical pumping is required for laser action. Optical pumping includes flash tubes, nitrogen lasers, excimer lasers, etc. A rare earth ion dissolved in a solution makes it possible to obtain optically pumped laser action in liquids. The first successful liquid laser was reported by using europium ions ($Eu^{+3}$) in which a sharp and strong laser transition was observed at $6131 A^{\circ}$ wavelength. In this laser, a europium chelate ($EuB_{4}P$) was prepared with benzovlacetate and dissolved in alcohol to give a europium concentration $1.2 \times 10^{19} centers/cm^{3}$. Due to the high absorption coefficient of chelate, it gives rise to pumping problems and their viscosity is so high that circulating motion is not feasible. The best solution to date is the liquid selenium oxychloride ($SeOCl_{2}$) which has a low refractive index, good optical transmission, and a density comparable to glass but it is highly toxic.
To reduce the problem in laser action due to high viscosity and pumping in chelate, the organic dyes are used as the lasing medium in liquid lasers. Dyes are organic substances that absorb in the near ultraviolet, visible, or near-infrared region of the spectrum.
When organic dyes are used as a lasing medium. usually, as a liquid solution, in a laser, it is called a dye laser. Examples of some dyes are rhodamine, coumarin, fluorescein, etc. A variety of solvents can be used in dye lasers. Some of the solvents used are water, glycol,
ethanol, methanol, hexane, cyclohexane, etc. The lasers using dyes like coumarin, xanthene, quinoline, etc. emit laser radiations in the range of wavelengths $400-500 \: nm, 500-70O \: nm, 400-4300 \: nm$, etc, respectively. These lasers have broad spectral bandwidth and fluorescent spectrum and emission in any region of the visible spectrum can be chosen from a large number of dyes. These lasers produce ultra-short pulses of half-width than with any other lasers. These lasers are the cheapest and one of the most widely tunable lasers in the visible region. Dye lasers Can be used as solid, liquid, and gas lasers but liquid solutions of dyes are convenient as their concentration can be controlled
