Researchers achieve extreme-ultraviolet spectral compression by four-wave mixing

Phys.org  January 25, 2021
Nonlinear optical techniques have made it possible to change the color of light and modify its spectral bandwidth without compromising the intensity. However, nonlinear optical techniques are not readily available in the XUV region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Researchers in Germany have demonstrated a concept for efficient spectral compression by four-wave mixing exploiting a phase-matching scheme based on closely spaced resonances. They compressed broadband radiation in the 145–130 nm wavelength range into a narrow-bandwidth XUV pulse at 100.3 nm wavelength in the presence of a broadband near-infrared pulse in a krypton gas jet. The narrowband XUV pulses has applications in electron spectroscopy, the investigation of resonant transitions, and the coherent diffractive imaging of nanoscale structures. In the future, the new method could also be used in the opposite direction, i.e., to spectrally broaden XUV pulses, which may result in the generation of very short XUV pulses from sources such as free-electron lasers and soft- X-ray lasers…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE

Experimental demonstration of XUV compression by means of FWM. Credit: Nature Photonics (2021)

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