Abstract

The recent demonstration of amplification schemes permitting ultrashort optical pulses to achieve peak powers in the terawatt regime has many important implications for areas such as multiphoton ionization and x-ray laser development. For many applications the high photon energy associated with KrF laser systems operating at 248 nm is very attractive. Such systems require ultrashort seed pulses at 248 nm, and to date these have been realized using two techniques. The first was based on a hybridly mode-locked cw dye laser operating around 745 nm, the output of which was fiber-optically compressed and frequency tripled to yield pulses of ~450-fs duration at 248 nm.¹

© 1988 Optical Society of America