ABSTRACT
The ultraviolet (UV) tunable lasers have become one of the most important tools in many fields of science and technology. The most impressive applications for them include environmental sensing, engine combustion diagnostics, semiconductor processing, micromaching, optical communications, and medicinal and biological applications. Tunability of the emission in solid-state lasers is achieved when the stimulated emission of photons is intimately coupled to the emission of vibrational quanta in a crystal lattice. In these “vibronic” lasers, the total energy of the lasing transition is fixed but can be partitioned between photons and phonons in a continuous fashion. The simple, compact, all-solid-state cerium laser can generate coherent radiation in this wavelength region. Further development of laser systems using these laser media will open up new possibilities of simple and compact tunable UV ultrashort-pulse laser light sources.
