ABSTRACT
Significant progress was observed in development of the collisionally pumped OFI lasers after its demonstration reported in [8]. The recombination scheme was tested in H-like lithium but mostly with a limited output from a short capillary due to the loss mechanisms mentioned above. Here we concentrate our interest on the recombination scheme working in a Li-like nitrogen (NV). The capillary discharge formed the plasma and a short linearly polarised laser pulse ionised it by tunneling. It will be shown that the plasma irradiation with 20 TW laser pulses is accompanied by a strong increase in intensity of a line at 24.77 nm, which corresponds to the transition 3ds/2 - 2p3/2 in Li-like nitrogen. It will also be shown that this increase in the line intensity could be explained by lasing. The set up of the experiment is shown in Fig. 1.
