Frequency and power stabilization of radio-frequency-excited CO2 laser using photoacoustic effect

We stabilized a frequency and a power of RF excited CO2 laser to the centers of the Doppler broadened gain curves using a photoacoustic effect generated from the laser itself. The frequency stability is estimated to be better than of 5.4x10-8 and power variation is greatly improved to 9%. We suggest that this method can be applied for frequency and power stabilization of other kinds of RF excited laser, for example Xe and CO laser.