A simple tunable KrF laser system with narrow bandwidth and diffraction-limited divergence

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Abstract
The authors present design and performance details of a simple discharge-excited KrF laser system comprising a slave oscillator injection-locked by a low power master oscillator. A single spark gap is used to control both discharges resulting in reliable synchronisation and sub-nanosecond jitter. The master oscillator is controlled by a cavity employing a grazing incidence grating and can be tuned over the full lasing bandwidth of the oscillator by adjusting only a single micrometer while producing linewidths less than 0.3 cm-1. The laser system is tunable from 248.05 nm to 248.58 nm. Up to 90% of the 5 MW output can be obtained in a single narrow line. The divergence of the output beam is close to the diffraction limit.