Hi,
I see a lot of advances in mid and near-IR lase spectroscopy including tunable lasers, diode lasers, cavity ring down, and more. But they are all in IR range. As far as I know UV lasers are practically limited due to lack of proper economical long lasting laser sources. My search in finding companies with already built in laser instruments, mostly for measuring gas samples, all ended up with IR lasers.
Is my understanding correct? your advice is really appreciated.
Mo
All depends on the practical availability of the lasing medium and their operational wavelength. You can find many commercially available lasers that operate in the near IR region based on various media such as Ti:Sa, Yb:YAG. While at the same time not much commercially available UV lasing materials can be found
Due to unavailability of laser in UV region or other lower wavelengths people use Synchrotron radiation for spectroscopic purposes. However it is equally important in all the other IR region also.
My personal understanding is that the application fields of UV lasers and infrared lasers are different. Ultraviolet lasers can be used in the field of lithography and inertial confinement fusion, and the field of application belongs to the niche field. Infrared laser applications are numerous, and many people in different fields can carry out research in this area, which is a popular field. Moreover, the detectors of the infrared laser spectrum are relatively mature, the price of the detector is also lower, and the industrial chain is completely opened up, so the cost is also reduced. I think these are the reasons why infrared spectroscopy is common than UV spectroscopy.
It is availability of the UV lasing media combined with the energy scale of the investigated structure. As has been said by Muath Nairat earlier, the tuneable UV lasers are much more rare than IR and visible systems.
Also the UV resonances are typical of electronic excitations, rather than more common pure rotational or vibrational structure excitations.
There are currently several types of UV lasers on the market. The point is that direct spectroscopy with UV light is not very conventional for several technical reasons. One such reason lies in the fact that there are no UV detectors as good and cheap as IR detectors. In general, UV is used in indirect spectroscopy. In this case, the UV radiation only excite the electrons and the successive decay is then measured at other wavelengths, as in fluorecent spectroscopy. Another problem for direct UV spectroscopy lies in the fact that several materials exhibit peak masking because of wide absorption bands and a multitude of prohibited transitions. Some of these problems can be circumvented by exploiting non-linear effects but are often costly and complex.
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