ABSTRACT
A design of a diode-pumped Nd:YAG laser for use as the driver for a soft-x-ray projection lithography system is described. This laser will output up to 1 J per pulse with a 2- to 5-ns pulse duration and a 400-Hz pulse repetition rate. The design employs microchannel-cooled diode laser arrays, zigzag slab energy storage, a regenerative amplifier cavity that uses phase conjugator beam correction for near-diffraction-limited beam quality, and stimulated Brillouin scattering pulse compression to achieve the required pulse length.
ABSTRACT
The shot-to-shot phase fidelity of a stimulated-Brillouin-scattering phase conjugator operated many times above threshold has been found to be very sensitive to the slope of the leading edge of the input pulse. For a pulse with a rising edge that is short relative to the acoustic lifetime of the stimulated-Brillouin-scattering medium, strong random fluctuations in the fidelity of the wave-front reversal are observed. However, by tailoring the leading edge of the pulse relative to the acoustic response time of the medium, good phase reproduction has been demonstrated for input energies of 100 times above threshold.
ABSTRACT
Tunable blue-green subpicosecond laser pulses have been amplified in an electron-beam-pumped XeF(C --> A) excimer amplifier. Small-signal gains of 3.5% cm(-1) were measured using a 50-cm active gain length. At output energy densities as high as 170 mJ/cm(2), only a small degree of saturation occurred, resulting in a gain of 2.5% cm(-1).
ABSTRACT
A method for producing diode laser spectroscopy scans which are several wavenumbers long, linear in frequency, and readily and accurately calibrated from reference spectra is described. The laser itself is current scanned under computer control over short segments (as is normally done) and such overlapping segments are linearized and pieced together to provide the final scan.
