Milliwatt coherent VUV radiation by all-solid-state tunable high-average-power laser system

Summary form only given. We demonstrate the high-power narrow-bandwidth coherent light in the VUV region by two-photon resonant four-wave mixing in Xe, where the excitation wavelength of two-photon transition 5p/sup 1/S/sub 0//spl rarr/6p[5/2,2] is 256.01 nm. The UV light is generated as the third harmonic of Ti:sapphire laser with nonlinear crystals. The VUV radiation is generated as the fifth harmonic by difference frequency mixing . The average power at VUV reaches up to 1 mW. To generate high-power VUV radiation we have developed an all-solid-state, narrow-bandwidth, tunable, high-average-power Ti:sapphire laser system, which produces 0.62-ns pulse at 5 kHz. We obtained average powers of 32 W at /spl omega/ and 6.3 W at 3/spl omega/ with LBO and CLBO Type I crystals. The average power of 32 W is the highest ever obtained in Ti:sapphire lasers and 6.3 W at 3/spl omega/ is also the highest in tunable UV lasers as far as we know.