Improvement of solid state Er:YAG pulse laser performance for use in medicine

The large quadratic electro-optic effect of PLZT ceramics allows to design small size modulators for the solid state infrared Er:YAG laser (lasing at (lambda) equals 2.94 micrometers - the most pronounced absorption band of water), which has found application in medicine for efficient ablation of hard and soft tissues. In the free-running mode, the Er:YAG laser emits spikes that form the pulse envelope with duration of 150 - 800 microsecond(s) . An extracavity PLZT 8.5/65/35 ceramics modulator (aperture of 4 X 6 mm2 and length of 18 mm) was used to obtain (Pi) -shaped segments with the rise and decay times less than 5 microsecond(s) . That allows to reduce considerably the fraction of the p…