Rare-gas dimer and halide lasers

A brief review is given of the development of excimer and exciplex rare-gas and rare-gas halide lasers. Attention is concentrated on the key features of the physics of the active media of lasers emitting in the spectral range from visible to vacuum ultraviolet. It is pointed out that the work of N G Basov and his colleagues played a decisive role in the attainment for the first time of lasing directly as a result of a photodissociative transition from a bound excited electronic state to a repulsive ground state.