A continuous discharge improves the performance of the Cu/CuCl double pulse laser

A continuous glow discharge was applied to a Cu/CuCl double pulse laser. Maximum laser pulse energy was observed to increase as much as 35 percent at low buffer gas pressure and 3.5 percent at optimum buffer gas pressure. Minimum and optimum time delays decreased with increasing glow discharge current. The greater pulse energy may be due to increased rate of current rise of the pumping discharge pulse, and decreased contribution to the population of metastable copper from ion recombination.