Chilla, Juan L. A., authorRocca, Jorge J., authorOptical Society of America, publisher2007-01-032007-01-031996Chilla, Juan L. A. and Jorge J. Rocca, Beam Optics of Gain-Guided Soft-X-Ray Lasers in Cylindrical Plasmas, Journal of the Optical Society of America. B, Optical Physics 13, no. 12 (December 1996): 2841-2851.http://hdl.handle.net/10217/67589We analyze soft-x-ray beam propagation and amplification in gain-guided amplifiers of cylindrical geometry for arbitrary gain and density profiles. A general relation that must be fulfilled for refraction not to be an impediment to the exponential growth of the intensity is obtained. It is shown that for sufficiently long plasma columns the effective gain, reduced by refraction, is determined solely by the gain and the curvature of the density profile at the position of maximum density, even when the location of the gain and the density maxima do not coincide. We analyze the case of amplifiers with gain-length approaching saturation and show that refraction reduces the effective gain-length product at which gain saturation occurs. The theoretical results are used to analyze the output of a capillary discharge soft-x-ray laser.born digitalarticleseng©1996 Optical Society of America.Copyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.Text