Generation of high-energy sub-20 fs pulses tunable in the 250-310 nm region by frequency doubling of a high-power noncollinear optical parametric amplifier.

We report on the generation of powerful sub-20 fs deep UV pulses with 10 microJ level energy and broadly tunable in the 250-310 nm range. These pulses are produced by frequency doubling a high-power noncollinear optical parametric amplifier and compressed by a pair of MgF2 prisms to an almost transform-limited duration. Our results provide a power scaling by an order of magnitude with respect to previous works.

[1]  J. Herrmann,et al.  Generation of sub-30 fs ultraviolet pulses by Raman induced phase modulation in nitrogen. , 2005, Optics express.

[2]  M M Murnane,et al.  Intense 8-fs pulse generation in the deep ultraviolet. , 1999, Optics letters.

[3]  Takao Fuji,et al.  Generation of 12 fs deep-ultraviolet pulses by four-wave mixing through filamentation in neon gas. , 2007, Optics letters.

[4]  Henry C. Kapteyn,et al.  16-fs, 1-microJ ultraviolet pulses generated by third-harmonic conversion in air. , 1996, Optics letters.

[5]  Eberhard Riedle,et al.  Tunable sub-10-fs ultraviolet pulses generated by achromatic frequency doubling. , 2004, Optics letters.

[6]  Kyriaki Kosma,et al.  Sub-10-fs supercontinuum radiation generated by filamentation of few-cycle 800 nm pulses in argon. , 2007, Optics letters.

[7]  S. Bradforth,et al.  Tunable 30-femtosecond pulses across the deep ultraviolet , 2005 .

[8]  M M Murnane,et al.  Ultrabroadband phase-matched optical parametric generation in the ultraviolet by use of guided waves. , 1997, Optics letters.

[9]  Ingolf V. Hertel,et al.  Ultrafast dynamics in isolated molecules and molecular clusters , 2006 .

[10]  C. Manzoni,et al.  300 microJ noncollinear optical parametric amplifier in the visible at 1 kHz repetition rate. , 2006, Optics letters.

[11]  D. Kane,et al.  Characterization of arbitrary femtosecond pulses using frequency-resolved optical gating , 1993 .

[12]  Andre Knoesen,et al.  Ultrashort-pulse second-harmonic generation. II. Non-transform-limited fundamental pulses , 1995 .