Progress and prospects for soft x-ray lasing driven by high power optical lasers

We will describe our optical laser pumped xuv Laser Program. To date, we have concentrated our efforts on exploding foil amplifier designs using Ne-like n=3p to 3s inversion schemes. We will describe our latest modeling results as well as measurements which demonstrate output power near the 1 MW level at 206 and 209 A and lasing at wavelengths as short as 106 A