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Efficient and compact short pulse MOPA system for laser-produced-plasma extreme-UV sources employing RF-discharge slab-waveguide CO2 amplifiers

Recent studies of fundamental issues of target material format and laser radiation parameters have revealed the attractiveness of LPP EUV source technology based on Sn target and multi-kW CO2 laser driver. In recent work we have reported 8kW of average power at 100kHz repetition frequency and 20ns pulse duration produced by our MOPA CO2 laser driver built on a chain of Fast Axial Flow (FAF) amplifiers. However, the oscillator power is insufficient to saturate the input stages and significant amount of available laser energy (>80%) is untapped. In this paper we report a step towards an improvement of laser driver power and efficiency. For the first time, to our knowledge, the performance of a novel multi-pass pre-amplifier based on RF-excited slab waveguide CO2 laser technology has been numerically modeled. The calculations show the feasibility of this approach. We carried out amplification experiments to validate the numerical model. In our experiments we have obtained power gain of 10 at 13-pass configuration from a slab of 60x600mm2 geometry at 20ns pulse length and 100kHz repetition frequency at diffraction-limited output and no self-oscillation. The experiment has validated the numerical model, which will be used at this stage to design and optimize a pre-amplifier for our current FAF amplifier chain. Furthermore, these results enable us to design and optimize next generation of LPP laser driver based entirely on compact slab-waveguide amplifiers.