Quasi-CW Ar metastable laser of 50 W using a temporally synthesized segmented configuration of fast pulsed discharge.

Optically pumped metastable rare gas lasers have attracted considerable interest as promising candidates for high energy laser systems. At present, producing a large-volume gain medium with high metastable atom density remains a critical challenge. In this work, a temporally synthesized segmented discharge based on repetitively fast pulsed DC discharge is employed to produce a gain medium with a volume of 0.96 cm3 and a peak number density approaching 1014 cm-3 at atmospheric pressure. Under high-power pumping, an average output power of 51.1 W is achieved in the quasi-CW regime at 50 kHz, with approximately 40% conversion efficiency and a power density of 53.2 W/cm3. Further improvements are expected to enhance output power at higher repetition rates.