Date of Award

Spring 5-2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics

Program/Concentration

Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics

Committee Director

Charles Sukenik

Committee Member

Robert Ash

Committee Member

Peter Bernath

Committee Member

Desmond Cook

Committee Member

Alexander Gurevich

Abstract

Metastable production of noble gases requires significant energy due to their filled valence shells. These transitions from the ground state are in the vacuum ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet, which are relatively inaccessible to lasers. This necessitates the use of either electron/ion bombardment via inefficient glow discharges or the use of high-power lasers and nonlinear processes. The all-optical production efficiency using these high-power lasers promises to be orders of magnitude higher than glow discharges, but far more costly. This work looks to improve all-optical production of metastable krypton (Kr*) through the use of a commercially available vacuum ultraviolet lamp with a low-power diode laser coupled to a power build-up cavity to excite two resonant transitions, and to leverage this excitation scheme in the study of producing a diode-pumped rare gas laser. The data obtained in this work show similar production rates to comparable, state-of-the-art work done by Z.T. Lu of Hefei National Laboratory, around 1010-1011 atoms/s for 84Kr, while using a lower-powered laser and a lower-flux lamp. These data show all-optical production to be comparable to the production rates of discharge-based production of Kr* but offer more scalability than glow discharges and eliminate the contamination caused by plasma-embedded Kr sputtering from chamber walls.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/9had-8k74

ISBN

9798834003274

Download

Share

COinS