Powerful short-pulse lasers pumped by the light of a shock wave front

Radiaion of a shock wave front proved to be very powerful light source for pumping of high power lasers. Particularly, explosively pumped iodine photodissociation lasers (EPIL) are nowadays well developed type of device of multikilojoule level, rather convenient for many applications. Usually such lasers work in free running mode and generate pulses of microsecond duration. Generating short pulses of nanosecond range require employing amplification scheme where amplifiers must work in waiting mode. It implies substantially other composition of active medium and entails rather important consequences for kinetics of the processes which follow photodissociation. Present report considers these problems as well as some experimental results obtained with short pulse EPIL.