UV disinfection is receiving renewed attention due to the global pandemic, as an immediately deployable and cost-effective option. The common sources used for this application are mercury lamps, emitting at 254 nm. Recently, different replacements have been proposed. Most of the focus is now on AlGaN UV LEDs, with numerous advantages (fast on/off switching, longer lifetime, reduced ozone generation, wider wavelength selection). Yet the wall plug efficiency of commercial LEDs at  260 nm is WPE < 1%, far below that of mercury lamps, and drops dramatically at shorter wavelengths. This work discusses the implementation of electron-beam pumped UV lamps as an alternative to LEDs to overcome issues related to doping, transport and contacting. This approach requires the synthesis of AlGaN nanostructures with high radiative efficiency at room temperature, and robust enough to operate under high-voltage electron injection. We have assessed the performance of AlGaN/AlN dots-in-a-wire and Stranski-Krastanov quantum dot superlattices for this application. Both kinds of nanostructures can display internal quantum efficiency  50% and as-grown external quantum efficiency up to 5% in the spectral range of interest. E-beam pumping offers also an interesting alternative for the fabrication of UV lasers, highly demanded in the fields of medicine, 3D printing and NLOS communication. For such devices, new architectures are required with the prospect of achieving room temperature deep-UV lasers. Here, we present a study of AlGaN heterostructures designed to lase under e-beam injection. We discuss the effect of polarization and demonstrate that the performance is improved using graded-index separate-confinement heterostructures (GRINSCH).