Excimer laser with two simultaneously excited active zones

The results are reported of investigations of the temporal and energy characteristics of radiation emitted by an electric-discharge XeCl laser with two active zones. Both active media, of the type He–Ar–Xe–HCl–H₂, were excited by a single current pulse. A regime was investigated in which the radiation from one active medium was amplified in the other. The measured value of the unsaturated gain was 0.16 cm^–1. When an unstable resonator was used in a master-oscillatoramplifier system, the radiation divergence was close to the diffraction limit: 30 μrad. The method of stimulated Raman scattering in compressed H₂ was used to obtain efficient conversion of the XeCl laser radiation to other spectral ranges.