ULTRASOL: Bright and Compact Tuneable Far-Ultraviolet Light Sources for New Applications

Far-ultraviolet laser sources have important applications in healthcare technology, semiconductor fabrication, and the processing and manufacturing of materials and devices that form components in high technology systems. To be useful, far-ultraviolet laser sources need to be bright and practical.

By brightness we refer to the ability to collect and refocus a light source into an extremely small spatial focus with high efficiency. By practicality, we refer to the physical size, complexity, fragility, or sheer cost of a source. Existing sources of far-ultraviolet light are either not sufficiently bright, are impractical, or both.

Many practical sources of far-ultraviolet light, such as gas discharge lamps, or excimer lamps or lasers, are very low brightness.

This severely limits the applications for which they can be used, ruling out areas such as precision machining or surgery, novel healthcare therapies, most forms of precision metrology, and most fundamental science applications.

We have pioneered research on laser pulse compression and frequency conversion based on soliton-dynamics in gas-filled hollow-core fibres, which forms the foundation of our new platform technology that finally enables practical high-brightness and ultrafast far-ultraviolet sources (down to wavelengths shorter than 120 nm).

The challenge we wish to address is the commercialisation of a highly practical source of far-ultraviolet light to target a multitude of applications, with an initial focus on precision manufacturing and material processing.