UV optics

Investigation of the rapidly-evolving dynamics of photo active biological and chemical systems via exploitation of time-resolved spectroscopy requires few-cycle pulses with central wavelengths in the range from near ultraviolet (UV) to vacuum UV (VUV). Despite the great efforts over the last decade, the generation of high-energy few-fs UV pulses remains non-trivial. A well-known alternative approach to generate few-fs pulses is nonlinear compression by means of dispersive dielectric multilayer mirrors. The concept has been successfully explored in the VIS and NIR spectral regions, has been expanded to the VUV and extreme UV (EUV) and is now approaching the range of near UV.