Generation of high-energy sub-20 fs pulses tunable in the 250-310 nm region by frequency doubling of a high-power noncollinear optical parametric amplifier.

We report on the generation of powerful sub-20 fs deep UV pulses with 10 microJ level energy and broadly tunable in the 250-310 nm range. These pulses are produced by frequency doubling a high-power noncollinear optical parametric amplifier and compressed by a pair of MgF2 prisms to an almost transform-limited duration. Our results provide a power scaling by an order of magnitude with respect to previous works.