New opportunity for using diatomic molecules in lasers pumped with solar radiation

An analysis is made of the possibility of constructing a cw laser converting solar radiation in a gaseous active medium consisting of a mixture of homonuclear and heteronuclear dimer molecules (which may be metal vapors) and a rare gas as a buffer. A population inversion is established in such a system as a result of photodissociation of dimer molecules into atoms in excited and ground states followed by recombination of the lasing atoms back to the original molecule as a result of three-particle collisions with the buffer gas atoms. It is shown that this system has a number of important advantages such as the chemical stability of the active medium during optical pumping, resistance to pyrolysis, and also a fairly high efficiency of ~ 3% at a relatively low degree of concentration of the solar energy ξ ≈ 50–100.