Abstract

The improvement of the optical quality of the laser radiation delivered by high-power excimers is strongly demanded to achieve a greater utilization of their laser energy. Moreover, in applications in which excimers are used for precision drilling, cutting and writing diffractive optical elements, laser beams of low divergence and with a quite uniform intensity profile are needed. Recently, plane-parallel cavities with a Gaussian-reflectivity-profile mirror as full reflector have been applied to a XeCl laser and it has been shown that excimer lasers fitted with plane-parallel Gaussian cavities deliver laser beams with quite uniform intensity profiles and with beam-quality-factor M² more than 50% smaller than that of laser beams delivered by plane-parallel cavities using conventional high reflectivity mirrors as full reflectors [1].

© 1998 IEEE