title: A novel vacuum ultra violet lamp for metastable rare gas experiments.
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.
authors.affiliation: Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Centre for Science and Peace Research (ZNF), University of Hamburg, 20144 Hamburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Heiner
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Daerr
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kohler
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sahling
authors.forename: Sandra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tippenhauer
authors.forename: Ariyan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Arabi-Hashemi
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Becker
authors.forename: Klaus
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sengstock
authors.forename: Martin B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Kalinowski