Ultrafast and octave-spanning optical nonlinearities from strongly phase-mismatched cascaded interactions
arXiv:1109.4261 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.043902
Abstract
Cascaded nonlinearities have attracted much interest, but ultrafast applications have been seriously hampered by the simultaneous requirements of being near phase-matching and having ultrafast femtosecond response times. Here we show that in strongly phase-mismatched nonlinear frequency conversion crystals the pump pulse can experience a large and extremely broadband self-defocusing cascaded Kerr-like nonlinearity. The large cascaded nonlinearity is ensured through interaction with the largest quadratic tensor element in the crystal, and the strong phase-mismatch ensures an ultrafast nonlinear response with an octave-spanning bandwidth. We verify this experimentally by showing few-cycle soliton compression with noncritical cascaded second-harmonic generation: Energetic 47 fs infrared pulses are compressed in a just 1-mm long bulk lithium niobate crystal to 17 fs (under 4 optical cycles) with 80% efficiency, and upon further propagation an octave-spanning supercontinuum is observed. Such ultrafast cascading is expected to occur for a broad range of pump wavelengths spanning the near- and mid-IR using standard nonlinear crystals.
resubmitted, revised version, accepted for Phys. Rev. Lett
References in corpus (5)
- Nonlocal explanation of stationary and nonstationary regimes in cascaded soliton pulse compression
- Limits to compression with cascaded quadratic soliton compressors
- Scaling laws for soliton pulse compression by cascaded quadratic nonlinearities
- Optical Cherenkov radiation by cascaded nonlinear interaction: an efficient source of few-cycle energetic near- to mid-IR pulses
- On type I cascaded quadratic soliton compression in lithium niobate: Compressing femtosecond pulses from high-power fiber lasers
Cited by in corpus (24)
- Resonant radiation shed by dispersive shock waves
- Nonlinearity management of photonic composites and observation of spatial-modulation instability due to quintic nonlinearity
- The anisotropic Kerr nonlinear refractive index of the beta-barium borate (β-BaB2O4) nonlinear crystal
- Generating mid-IR octave-spanning supercontinua and few-cycle pulses with solitons in phase-mismatched quadratic nonlinear crystals
- Multiple-octave spanning mid-IR supercontinuum generation in bulk quadratic nonlinear crystals
- Experimental observation of long-wavelength dispersive wave generation induced by self-defocusing nonlinearity in BBO crystal
- Energetic mid-IR femtosecond pulse generation by self-defocusing soliton-induced dispersive waves in a bulk quadratic nonlinear crystal
- Higher-order Kerr effect and harmonic cascading in gases
- Soliton-induced nonlocal resonances observed through high-intensity tunable spectrally compressed second-harmonic peaks
- Nonlinear Wave Equation in Frequency Domain: Accurate Modeling of Ultrafast Interaction in Anisotropic Nonlinear Media
- Efficient supercontinuum generation in quadratic nonlinear waveguides without quasi-phase matching
- Parametrically tunable soliton-induced resonant radiation by three-wave mixing
- Supercontinuum Generation by Saturated Second-Order Nonlinear Interactions
- Generation of 1.5-octave intense infrared pulses by nonlinear interactions in DAST crystal
- Mid-IR femtosecond frequency conversion by soliton-probe collision in phase-mismatched quadratic nonlinear crystals
- Negative-frequency dispersive wave generation in quadratic media
- Review of measurements of Kerr nonlinearities in lithium niobate: the role of the delayed Raman response
- Soliton compression to few-cycle pulses with a high quality factor by engineering cascaded quadratic nonlinearities
- Spectral characterization of a frequency comb based on cascaded quadratic nonlinearities inside an optical parametric oscillator
- Intense sub-2 cycle infrared pulse generation via phase mismatched cascaded nonlinear interaction in DAST crystal
- Modeling of quasi-phase-matched cavity enhanced second harmonic generation
- Exact cascading nonlinearity in quasi-phase-matched quadratic media
- Two-optical-cycle pulses from nanophotonic two-color soliton compression
- Peregrine solitons and resonant radiation in cubic and quadratic media