Femtosecond gain characteristics of the discharge-pumped ArF excimer amplifier.

The gain characteristics of a discharge-pumped ArF excimer amplifier are measured with ~700-fs-long pulses. The small-signal gain and saturation energy are found to be 0.17 cm(-1) and 3.65 +/- 0.15 mJ/cm(2), respectively. The maximum output energy density extracted from the deeply saturated amplifier is as much as 10 mJ/cm(2). The demonstrated femtosecond gain characteristics of ArF indicate that, by utilizing sufficiently high seed pulse energies, the ArF excimer laser is expected to show a performance similar to a femtosecond high-brightness KrF excimer laser system.