Abstract

To date, the application of excimer lasers spans many fields of science and technology. In particular, recent progress in discharge-pumped XeCl lasers is attracting much attention in the field of laser chemistry, microelectronics processing, and laser isotope separation. Such application have motivated the development of a high-energy and high-average-power XeCl laser with high efficiency. In addition to the technological difficulty in scaling up a UV/X-ray preionized device using a water dielectric pulse forming line (PFL) together with a rail gap switch, some problems remaining to be solved are the short pulse length, poor spatial mode quality, and limited system lifetimes, all of which are associated with the discharge characteristics.

© 1983 Optical Society of America