Abstract
Energetic femtosecond, vacuum UV (VUV) pulses have numerous applications in ultrafast spectroscopy of many atoms and molecules with the absorption bands in this wavelength range. The generation of these pulses remains difficult because of the lack of appropriate nonlinear crystals. Even the few available crystals prevent the generation of sub 100 fs pulses because of their large dispersion. By using gases as nonlinear medium, pulses as short as 11 fs have been generated as the fifth harmonic of a Ti:sapphire laser [1], however with only a few nJ of pulse energy. More energetic pulses, but with somewhat longer pulse duration of 140 fs have been generated by four-wave-mixing (FWM) in an argon filled hollow-waveguide [2]. Recently our group presented the efficient generation of sub-50-fs pulses at 160 nm with several µJ of energy at 1 kHz repetition rate, by applying non-collinear FWM in an argon filament [3]. In this experiment, the shortest, achievable pulse duration was only limited by the duration of fundamental frequency (FF) pulse serving as the idler in FWM process.
© 2011 Optical Society of America
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