Spectral brightness and other improvements to the tunable ArF excimer laser

We present two oscillator designs and a new amplification design which improves many characteristics of the dual-discharge tube tunable ArF excimer laser. We demonstrate bandwidths from 0.17–11.0 cm−1 (5–330 GHz) can be selected by appropriate choice of oscillator slit width and diffraction-grating dispersion. Amplification is achieved using three consecutive passes through the discharge tubes. This amplifier design decreases divergence (9×diffraction limit) and increases output energy (33%), locking efficiency (20%), range of tunability (40%), and spectral brightness (two orders-of-magnitude) when compared to the standard unstable-resonator amplifier.