Generation of tunable 7-fs ultraviolet pulses: achromatic phase matching and chirp management

Ultraviolet pulses with a duration of 7 fs are efficiently generated by frequency doubling the output of a noncollinear optical parametric amplifier. The ultraviolet pulses are tunable between 275 to 335 nm. The acceptance bandwidth of the doubling crystal is increased by a factor of 80 through high-order achromatic phasematching. The chirp of the visible pulses and the dispersion introduced along the beam path are compensated partially before and partially after the doubling crystal. For the design of the dispersion management, we investigate the second harmonic generation of pulses with mixed orders of chirp and explicitly discuss the transfer of the spectral phase in frequency doubling. A simple analytic theory is derived that correctly describes frequently observed spectral narrowing effects. We find that chirped SHG avoids spectral narrowing and allows for precompression of dispersion encountered in the ultraviolet beam path. We apply chirped SHG to generate 18.7 fs ultraviolet pulses in an extremely simple setup.