Abstract

Since the first disclosure¹ at CLEO in 1984 on the use of saturable magnetic material to isolate a relatively fast (<100 ns) high voltage spike (typically ~40 kV) for gas breakdown from a slowly charged (>1 μs) low voltage (~10 kV), high capacitance, main energy storage network, magnetic-spiker excitation^2-5 has proved to be an excellent means of producing both long optical excimer laser pulses [XeC1 (1 μs), KrF (170 ns)]⁶ as well as high average powers (XeC1, 500 W).² These excimer lasers can be considered for the first time as true lasers complete with control⁸ over polarization, divergence, linewidth, rather than marginally controlled sources of amplified spontaneous emission.

© 1992 Optical Society of America