Injection control of a long-pulse electron-beam pumped XeF (C →A) laser

An XeF (C→A) laser, pumped at a rate of 290 kW/cm³ with a 600-ns electron-beam pulse, has been operated as an injection-controlled oscillator. A stable cavity has been injected with radiation from a pulsed dye laser source. A significant reduction in laser turn-on time has been achieved, and the laser pulse duration has been extended to 500 ns (FWHM). As a consequence, the laser intrinsic efficiency and specific output energy have been increased by approximately 50%, to 1.8% and 3 J/L, respectively, which represent the best performance obtained thus far for any directly electrically excited XeF (C→A) laser. Also, by injecting a narrowband signal into the cavity, the XeF (C→A) laser linewidth has been reduced by more than two orders of magnitude, to less than 1.3 Å, the resolution of the spectrometer. The laser wavelength has been tuned from 478.6 to 486.8 nm, with less than a factor of two variation in output energy