Technical Communication) Advances in 193 nm Lasers for Fiber Bragg Grating Manufacturing

摘要

Ongoing progress in the manufacturing of fiber Bragg gratings is to a large extent driven by ul-tra-short wavelength excimer lasers at 193 nm. This paper will introduce the latest improvements achieved in the development of compact high repetition rate excimer lasers and elaborate on the im-pact FBG writing instrumentation. Performance and lifetime measurements obtained in a long-term endurance test over the course of 18 months will be shown and discussed. In order to open up the path from laboratory space to broad market industrial use, sufficient component lifetimes and long-term stable performance behavior of the excimer laser have to be ensured. The results shown are based on diverse 193 nm excimer laser tube improvements aiming at optimizing the gas flow dy-namics. This has led to extending the operational life of such compact 193 nm excimer laser tubes for the first time over several billion pulses even under high duty-cycle conditions