Current rise-time limitation of the large volume x-ray preionized discharge-pumped XeCl laser

Abstract

Sixty-six joules has been extracted from a 22-l active volume, 5-atm laser mixture, in a 180-ns (FWHM) optical pulse. The best efficiency obtained under these conditions was 0.8%, based on the available energy stored in the double Blumlein. For the laser chamber geometry used in this experiment it was essential that the surface track path between the positive high-voltage electrode and any ground be a minimum of 3 times the interelectrode separation. The small-signal gain under these operating conditions was 6.0% cm−1 and the measured absorption at the peak of the gain was 0.4% cm−1. We observe that for both volumetric scaling and pulse length scaling the current rise time is of critical importance.