A simple room temperature detector for use with carbon dioxide lasers

It is shown that pyroelectric thermal receivers may be useful for laboratory studies involving CO 2 lasers. A detector of this type using a commercially available ceramic disk capacitor has been constructed and has been found to have a high frequency time constant of better than 5 μsec. This detector may be used to measure (i) the energy in a Q -switched pulse, (ii) the time-dependent intensity of radiation from a pulsed laser discharge and (iii) the intensity of radiation from a continuous wave laser. In the last case, this detector is linear with respect to incident radiation flux over the range 0-60 w cm -2 and gives an output of 1.3MVW -1 cm -2 when shunted with a 1 MΩ resistor.