Tunable Short Wavelength Generation and Applications

Abstract

A review is given on methods to generate light of a coherent short wavelength and applications in mol. and anal. chem. Laser UV and VUV sources based on stimulated emission are presented as well as nonlinear optical sources. Frequency doubling with inorg. and org. crystals is discussed. Continuous-wave UV laser systems and optical parametric oscillators are treated. For coherent VUV generation, 3 3rd-order optical schemes are considered, namely (i) nonresonant 3rd harmonic generation (THG), (ii) 2-photon, resonance-enhanced 4-wave sum- and difference mixing, and (iii) coherent anti-Stokes Raman shifting. Application examples are given using coherent light sources generated by nonlinear optical means and operating in the 6-19 eV energy range. Special emphasis was laid on the spectroscopical investigation of diat. rare-gas mols. Then, the high-resoln., zero-kinetic-energy (ZEKE) photoelectron spectroscopy is presented. Furthermore, application examples from org. anal. chem. are summarized dealing with the soft ionization and detection of org. mols. using a combination of VUV lasers and mass spectrometry. [on SciFinder (R)]