THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL-DETERMINATION OF SINGLE ROUND-TRIP BEAM PARAMETERS IN A XE-CL LASER

The evolution of the main parameters (spot size, radius of curvature, and far-field divergence) of the beam provided by a high-gain, short-p ulse Xe-Cl laser equipped with a plane-parallel Gaussian resonator has been investigated both theoretically and experimentally as a function of the number of round trips. It is shown Bat a theoretical analysis, formerly developed to study the growth of coherence of a Schell-Gauss model beam propagating through a periodic sequence of Gaussian apertu res, provides a satisfactory description of the temporal evolution of the Xe-Cl laser beam. A good agreement between theoretical and experim ental data has been found.