Tunable excimer lasers

The wide bandwidth nature of the rare-gas halide excimer transitions allow reasonable tuning of the laser oscillation wavelength that makes it useful for a number of applications. At the same time this wide bandwidth makes narrow band operation difficult and special techniques are needed to insure narrow frequency lasing as well as absolute frequency resettability. The author discusses briefly some of the classical frequency narrowing techniques and then goes on to some recent work that require lasers of special frequency characteristics for special applications including KrF laser fusion