Abstract

Excimer lasers offer considerable potential as pump sources for optical parametric oscillators operating throughout the visible and near infra-red because of the large number of ultra-violet laser wavelengths they make available at relatively high efficiency. However, up until recently a major limitation to the use of these lasers in such applications has been their excessive linewidth and poor beam quality. The recent developments in injection seeding and related techniques as applied to excimer lasers have resulted in significant improvement in both these parameters, so that the use of excimer lasers as pumps for optical parametric oscillators is now practicable. We have developed an optical parametric oscillator, using urea as the nonlinear material, and a line-narrowed XeCl excimer laser operating at 308 nm as the pump source. In this initial demonstration, an output of 0.25 mJ was obtained from the parametric oscillator for a pump pulse energy of 10 m J.

© 1988 Optical Society of America