Abstract

The pursuit of short-wavelength chemical lasers (SWCL) has persisted for two decades, a fact which ought to lead us to ask some hard questions: Are there fundamental reasons underlying our limited success, or have we been unlucky? Have we been looking at the best approaches? Most importantly, what should we now be doing to invent viable SWCLs? The current research program assumes that the critical issues are the formation and maintenance of high densities of electronically excited species. We are not convinced that the conventional continuous-flow mixing approach is the most promising one. This concern is based on various limiting effects on density, including the radiative-lifetime/mixing-time problem.

© 1986 Optical Society of America