Influence of water vapour impurities on the atomic Xe laser

Abstract

The influence of water vapour impurities on the output power of the 1.73 µm 5d[3/2] 1 -6p[5/2] 2 Xe I laser has been studied. The laser gas was a mixture of 99.5% Ar and 0.5% Xe with a total pressure of 500 mbar and was pumped by 50 µs long 100 MeV 32 S 9+ heavy ion beam pulses. The gas remained essentially at room temperature during the pumping pulses. A significant reduction of laser power was observed when water vapour at a concentration of more than 10 14 cm −3 was added. A simple model assuming electron attachment and collisional quenching by water vapour as the dominant causes for reduced laser intensity was used to fit the experimental data. We obtained a rate constant for quenching the upper laser level (K Q H 2 O ) of 4 × 10 −9 cm 3 s −1 , and a ratio of the rate constant of electron attachment to water vapour to total recombination rate of 6 × 10 −16 cm 3 .

Laser effect on the 248nm KrF transition using heavy ion beam pumping

“…Various laser schemes have been studied [4][5][6][7][8], but due to the limited pumping power levels provided by ion accelerators, the wavelength range of ion beam pumped lasers had been limited to the infrared and visible spectral region [9,10]. Short wavelength ion beam pumped lasers may have some applications as special light sources e.g.…”