Stimulated emission kinetics of an N2 laser under pulseperiodic conditions. I. Theory

An analysis is made of a theoretical model of the mechanism for the drop in the stimulated emission pulse power of a nitrogen laser at high pump pulse repetition frequencies. It is shown that the output power drop is cause by a decrease in the gain of the lasing transition. The dependence of the gain on the discharge plasma parameters (the vibrational and translational temperatures, and the density of the N₂ molecules in the ground electronic state) is determined and estimates are made of the range of variation of these parameters for a sealed longitudinally pumped N₂ laser. It is shown that relaxation of the vibrationally excited nitrogen atoms should play a major part in the mechanism under study.