Long pulse behavior of the avalanche/self-sustained discharge pumped XeCl laser

Homogeneous and stable avalanche/self-sustained discharges of 200-nsec duration have been obtained in typical XeCl laser gas mixtures at relatively high gas pressures (1–4 atm) and high energy loadings (100–400 J/liter-atm). The laser output waveform, however, is found to be surprisingly sensitive to changes in gas pressure and composition. Under certain conditions, the laser power remains nearly constant for 200 nsec, so that the total output energy scales roughly with the discharge duration. The highest XeCl laser pulse energy extracted from a 1-liter volume in this series of experiments is 3.2 J at ∼4% intrinsic efficiency.