Transform-limited-bandwidth injection locking of an XeF laser

A pulsed Ar-ion laser, operating on the 3511 A line of the doubly ionized species, was used to injection lock an unstable resonator XeF laser. A single longitudinal mode of the Ar-ion laser was selected with a Fabry-Perot etalon, and the resulting XeF bandwidth was measured to be approximately 50 MHz which is the Fourier-transform limit corresponding to the XeF laser pulse duration of approximately 20 ns. Since the XeF B yields X emission originates from more than one upper vibrational level, for this pulse duration it was determined that approximately 60% of the total output was available to be locked to the reference oscillator line. The 2 MW output beam was also found to be near ( 1.5 x) diffraction limited.