We developed a compact and portable set-up, based on an original design, able to generate very broadband (70-100 nm at 300 nm) and powerful (J to mJ per pulse) ultrashort UV pulses (270-370nm and pulse lengths of few fs to 100s fs), based on frequency doubling of broadband ultrafast visible pulses. There is no such a source commercially available and the schemes proposed in scientific literature require an advanced level of competence in optics and laser physics and are not cost-effective and unsuitable for industrial and medical applications. Compared with other schemes, our device guarantees an aberration-free propagation with minimal dispersion and an easy installation and maintenance. We conceived and tested different implementations. The best design, chosen according to performance, practicality and cost-effectiveness was identified and chosen to build an industrial-grade demonstrator. It is a compact, portable and cost-effective device, with minimal maintenance and a user-friendly design. The device was recently launched on the market and is now commercialized by 8photonics (
https://8photonics.com/(si apre in una nuova finestra)) with the name “femto-DUVALight”.
About the socioeconomic impact, the development of sources of tuneable and very broadband femtosecond pulses in the visible and near infrared has allowed establishing a countless number of applications and techniques that have tremendously impacted on society and economics as in medical domain (medical device fabrication, cardiovascular stent manufacturing, laser eye surgery), bio-imaging (multiphoton microscopy, multimodal imaging, coherent anti-Stokes and stimulated Raman microscopies, super-resolution microscopies), advanced micromachining (pulsed laser assisted nano-material fabrication, thin films micromachining, two-photon polymerization, precision micromachining), new tools for scientific research (multidimensional coherent spectroscopies, coherent control, femtosecond time-resolved spectroscopies, etc). The lack of broad and powerful sources in the deep-UV and UV range is hindering a full development of these applications and the extension to important materials as for instance wild-gap semiconductors and insulators (e.g. most of the metal oxides as TiO2 or ZnO and relative nanomaterials), the majority of biological molecules, bio-inspired supramolecular devices or DNA based nano-devices because most of the amino-acids, all the nucleotide bases and several cyclic compounds are transparent to Vis radiation. The implementation of our device has finally filled this gap.
