Ultraviolet sources for advanced applications in the vacuum UV and near UV

This dissertation documents a systematic study consisting of experimental investigations and theoretical analyses of intense ultraviolet sources in VUV and near-UV. Some engineering issues regarding two prototypes of electrodeless lamps using rf and microwave are discussed.;Various excimers that produce intense UV light are investigated, including: (1) A benchmark Xe2 excimer which has been proven to be very efficient in our novel rf capacitively coupled discharge lamp; (2) A rarely studied excimer, KrI, which suffers from predissociation and was reported to be very weak or invisible by most of other studies; (3) XeI excimer whose emission dominates around 253 nm and is promising as a mercury-free lamp for antibacterial applications. In the above studies, discharge temperatures are estimated from the emission band width. An elaborate kinetic model is developed for KrI to account for the KrI* and I2* intensities as a function of pressure. It was found that Kr2* plays the rule for energy transfer instead of Kr* in the pressure of interest. The electromagnetic wave interaction with charge particles is studied in our 2D and 3D EM-PIC simulations for both the rf and microwave lamps. Important plasma parameters, such as the electron density and temperature are obtained for various pressures. The electron energy distribution function that is important to account for excimer excitation is obtained.;We also performed a high-level ab initio calculation in Gaussian to produce the ground state potential curve for KrI, which agrees with previous scattering experiments and is necessary for predicting spectral emissions. as a systematic study to account for the KrI emission spectra at high pressure, we use a semiclassical model to account for emissions between a bound excited state and an unbound ground state. An explicit expression is obtained to represent the observed spectral intensity. Important molecular constants are obtained for KrI and compared with previous results.