A novel vacuum ultra violet lamp for metastable rare gas experiments

Heiner Daerr; Markus Kohler; Peter Sahling; Sandra Tippenhauer; Ariyan Arabi-Hashemi; Christoph Becker; Klaus Sengstock; Martin B Kalinowski

doi:10.1063/1.3610465

A novel vacuum ultra violet lamp for metastable rare gas experiments

Rev Sci Instrum. 2011 Jul;82(7):073106. doi: 10.1063/1.3610465.

Authors

Heiner Daerr¹, Markus Kohler, Peter Sahling, Sandra Tippenhauer, Ariyan Arabi-Hashemi, Christoph Becker, Klaus Sengstock, Martin B Kalinowski

Affiliation

¹ Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Centre for Science and Peace Research (ZNF), University of Hamburg, 20144 Hamburg, Germany.

PMID: 21806171
DOI: 10.1063/1.3610465

Abstract

We report on a new design of a vacuum ultra violet (VUV) lamp for direct optical excitation of high laying atomic states, e.g., for excitation of metastable rare gas atoms. The lamp can be directly mounted to ultra-high vacuum vessels (p ≤ 10(-10)mbar). It is driven by a 2.45 GHz microwave source. For optimum operation, it requires powers of ~20 W. The VUV light is transmitted through a magnesium fluoride window, which is known to have a decreasing transmittance for VUV photons with time. In our special setup, after a run-time of the VUV lamp of 550 h the detected signal continuously decreased to 25% of its initial value. This corresponds to a lifetime increase of two orders of magnitude compared to previous setups or commercial lamps.