Abstract
Laser light can be focused to extremely small areas of high intensity, offering ultimate spatial resolution when both measuring and altering matter. Lasers can also produce light pulses with a duration short enough to stroboscopically capture the fastest processes occurring in nature, enabling us to better understand their dynamics.
Combined, these features have made laser sources indispensable to both fundamental science and wide-ranging applications in industry and engineering. From healthcare to manufacturing, semiconductor technology to telecommunications, light emitted by lasers is an essential, often a foundational, component of critical instruments and techniques.
Many of these areas would benefit from a practical and high-brightness laser light source in the deep and vacuum ultraviolet spectral regions, collectively referred to as the far-ultraviolet, and span wavelengths from 50 nm to 300 nm. Far-ultraviolet light is especially important as it is quickly absorbed by all atoms and molecules, making it the ideal tool to probe and process virtually any material with extreme precision.
Existing light source technologies in this region either have very poor spatial quality (excimer lasers, discharge lamps), have very low efficiency or lifetime (conventional nonlinear optics) or require extremely large and expensive building-scale facilities (synchrotrons). None of these offer a practical source to enable a new generation of precision applications of light in the far ultraviolet.
Together with my research group, I have pioneered a new technique to generate pulses of far-ultraviolet light, based on the use of soliton dynamics in gas-filled waveguides, which outperforms all previous techniques. We can generate tuneable, highly focusable, extremely intense, and extremely short pulses of far-ultraviolet light in a compact table-top system that exceeds the capabilities even of building-scale facilities.
I will explain this technique and what we have achieved so far. I will then examine how we plan to scale it both upwards, to achieve extreme pulses of light to probe new fundamental physics, and downwards, to develop photonic-chip-sized devices that can enable new applications essential to the health and wellbeing of society.
