Samenvatting

The goal of this thesis is achieving saturation intensity of 76.5 mW/cm2for 2S1/2F=1 - 2P1/2F = 2 transition in singly-ionized beryllium ions (Be+). By enlarging the optical power of a laser diode at 626.266 nm via a bow-tie cavity and converting to 313.133 nm using Second Harmonic Generation in a nonlinear crystal like BBO or LBO, the saturation intensity can be obtained. The BBO crystal is used because this type of crystal has a higher conversion efficiency with respect to a LBO crystal. For an optical power of 8 m W at 626.266 nm fed into the cavity, the amount of second harmonic light is on the order of 10 microwatts. To obtain a saturation intensity of765 W/m2, approximately 10μW of 313 nm light must be concentrated to a circular symmetric beam profile with a beam radius of less than 55μm. Since the crystals are fabricated in such a way that the phase-matching condition for 626 nm in there sonance cavity cannot be fulfilled, producing 10μW of second harmonic light remains a theoretical possibility.