Abstract

We have developed a 2 kW XeCl laser for industrial use as parts of national project in Japan.¹ It has the excitation system composed of a surface corona discharge preionization scheme and a spiker-sustainer circuit.² The reverse voltage mode operation in the spiker-sustainer circuit and the control of the preionization timing enable the laser to operate at high repetition rate over 500 Hz. An average power of 505 W is obtained with an effective discharge length of 1 m.³ The 2 kW laser is designed to extend the effective discharge length up to 3 m and increase the repetition rate over 700 Hz. In the previous conference¹ we have shown that the average power of 1.98 kW is obtained with a conventional stable resonator. After that we have applied a complex resonator and have succeeded in the improvement of laser power extraction up to 2.1 kW.

© 1995 IEEE