Quasicontinuous excitation regime of electric-discharge exciplex lasers

Abstract

An investigation is made of the feasibility of establishing a quasicontinuous discharge stage in exciplex lasers. An analysis is made of a discharge model based on allowance for multistage ionization and attachment processes. It is shown that stabilization of the discharge may be achieved by selecting the parameters of the electric circuit whereby the electron density and the metastable concentration of the rare gas atoms should correspond to certain steady-state values. A quasicontinuous discharge stage of up to 1 ..mu..sec duration was achieved experimentally. The proposed model was used to make numerical calculations of oscillograms of the plasma voltage and discharge current. The calculations give good qualitative agreement with the experiment. Laser radiation was achieved at the quasicontinuous stage of a discharge in XeCl* of 250-nsec duration. It is shown that the quasicontinuous excitation regime can substantially increase the radiation energy of electric-discharge lasers.