Power degradation due to thermal effects in Potassium Diode Pumped Alkali Laser

This paper presents results of our study of the performance of a Potassium DPAL operating in pulsed mode with pump pulses from 0.05 to 5 ms long at different pump powers and alkali cell temperatures. The experiments showed the DPAL output power degradation in time with a characteristic time in the range from 0.5 ms to 4.5 ms. We attribute the power degradation to heating of the vapor. The recorded spectrum of the side fluorescence indicates that multi-photon excitation, energy pooling collisions and ionization are also present.