Abstract

The recent advances in femtosecond vacuum UV (VUV) pulse generation, pioneered by the work of Noack et al., has enabled new experiments in ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy. Expanding on this work, we report the generation of 60 fs VUV pulses at the 7th harmonic of Ti:sapphire with more than 50 nJ of pulse energy at a repetition rate of 1 kHz. The 114.6 nm pulses are produced using non-collinear four-wave difference-frequency mixing in argon. The non-collinear geometry increases the phase-matching pressure, and results in a conversion efficiency of ∼10⁻³ from the 200 nm pump beam. The VUV pulses are pre-chirp-compensated for material dispersion with xenon, which has negative dispersion in this wavelength range, thus allowing almost transform-limited pulses to be delivered to the experimental chamber.

Generation of 2.5 μJ vacuum ultraviolet pulses with sub-50 fs duration by noncollinear four-wave mixing in argon

M. Ghotbi, M. Beutler, and F. Noack
Opt. Lett. 35(20) 3492-3494 (2010)

Generation of sub-50-fs vacuum ultraviolet pulses by four-wave mixing in argon

Marcus Beutler, Masood Ghotbi, Frank Noack, and Ingolf Volker Hertel
Opt. Lett. 35(9) 1491-1493 (2010)

Generation of tunable sub-45 femtosecond pulses by noncollinear four-wave mixing

Masood Ghotbi, Peter Trabs, Marcus Beutler, and Frank Noack
Opt. Lett. 38(4) 486-488 (2013)

Generation of sub-17  fs vacuum ultraviolet pulses at 133  nm using cascaded four-wave mixing through filamentation in Ne

Takuya Horio, Roman Spesyvtsev, and Toshinori Suzuki
Opt. Lett. 39(20) 6021-6024 (2014)

Vacuum ultraviolet pulses of 11 fs from fifth-harmonic generation of a Ti:sapphire laser

Kyriaki Kosma, Sergei A. Trushin, Wolfram E. Schmid, and Werner Fuß
Opt. Lett. 33(7) 723-725 (2008)