Tuning and Control of Ultrafast Vacuum Ultraviolet Laser Source via Highly Cascaded Harmonic Generation*

Covering approximately 6-15 eV, vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) light has a unique ability to probe physical and chemical processes. However, efficient generation and control of femtosecond pulses in this region has proven difficult. Couch et al. have demonstrated a technique for generating ultrafast VUV pulses using a highly cascaded four-wave mixing process [1]. Here, we build upon the work done in [1] to investigate tuning and control methods for these VUV pulses via numerical solution of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation.

[1] David E. Couch, Daniel D. Hickstein, David G. Winters, Sterling J. Backus, Matthew S. Kirchner, Scott R. Domingue, Jessica J. Ramirez, Charles G. Durfee, Margaret M. Murnane, and Henry C. Kapteyn. Ultrafast 1 mhz vacuum-ultraviolet source via highly cascaded harmonic generation in negative-curvature hollow-core fibers. Optica, 7(7):832–837, Jul 2020