Abstract

Several fields of contemporary physics and chemistry, such as femtochemistry, time-resolved spectroscopy or attosecond pulse generation can benefit from ultrashort deep-UV pulses. Unfortunately, the generation of such pulses is rather challenging. Existing sources directly generating DUV pulses are rather exotic and up to now they could not generate pulses shorter than ~100 fs. Therefore the usual approach has been to convert the ultrashort pulses generated by standard IR laser systems into the DUV range by some ultrabroadband frequency conversion technique. In this way sub-20 fs pulses could be generated in the DUV, however the pulse energy has been limited to a few microjoules [1-4].

© 2009 IEEE