Evaluation of Nd-glass laser systems for incoherent Thomson scattering diagnostics of low density plasmas.

Conventional Thomson scattering using a ruby laser evidences difficulty in scattered signal detection for electron densities < 10(13) cm(-3). Use of a Nd-glass laser source in combination with appropriate detectors can result in gains in the resolution of scattered signal of at least 1 order of magnitude over a conventional ruby laser system. However, due to the ~2.5-nm full bandwidth of a Nd-glass laser line, the electron temperature information in the incoherent scattered signal must be extracted from a Voigt profile, not from the usual Gaussian profile as when a ruby laser is used.