Triple resonant four-wave mixing boosts the yield of continuous coherent vacuum ultraviolet generation.

Efficient continuous-wave four-wave mixing by using three different fundamental wavelengths with individual detunings to resonances of the nonlinear medium is shown. Up to 6 μW of vacuum ultraviolet light at 121 nm can be generated, which corresponds to an increase of three orders of magnitude in efficiency. This opens the field of quantum information processing by Rydberg entanglement of trapped ions.