Title

Intense Few-Cycle Visible Pulses Directly Generated Via Nonlinear Fibre Mode Mixing

Author ORCID Identifier

Morandotti, Roberto: 0000-0001-7717-1519
Piccoli, Riccardo: 0000-0002-5037-5471
Razzari, Luca: 0000-0002-8514-2192
Travers, John: 0000-0003-0350-9104

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2021

Abstract

Extremely short, high-energy pulses are essential in modern ultrafast science. In a seminal paper in 1996(1), Nisoli and co-workers demonstrated the first intense pulse compression employing a gas-filled hollow-core fibre. Despite the huge body of scientific work on this technology stemming from ultrafast and attosecond research, here we identify an unexplored few-cycle visible-light generation mechanism, which relies on the nonlinear mixing of hollow-core fibre modes. Using a commercially available ytterbium laser, we generate 4.6 fs, 20 mu J pulses centred at around 600 nm (-2 cycles, similar to 4 GW peak power), similar to 40 times shorter than the input 175fs, 1mJ pulses at 1,035 nm. Our approach thus directly projects few-hundred-femtosecond-long infrared pulses into the single-cycle regime at visible frequencies, without the need for additional post-compression. As a powerful application of our findings, we present a compact, multicolour pump-probe set-up with a temporal resolution of a few optical cycles.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Nature Photonics

First Page

884

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