Soliton compression to few-cycle pulses with a high quality factor by engineering cascaded quadratic nonlinearities

Abstract

We propose an efficient approach to improve few-cycle soliton compression with cascaded quadratic nonlinearities by using an engineered multi-section structure of the nonlinear crystal. By exploiting engineering of the cascaded quadratic nonlinearities, in each section soliton compression with a low effective order is realized, and high-quality few-cycle pulses with large compression factors are feasible. Each subsequent section is designed so that the compressed pulse exiting the previous section experiences an overall effective self-defocusing cubic nonlinearity corresponding to a modest soliton order, which is kept larger than unity to ensure further compression. This is done by increasing the cascaded quadratic nonlinearity in the new section with an engineered reduced residual phase mismatch. The low soliton orders in each section ensure excellent pulse quality and high efficiency. Numerical results show that compressed pulses with less than three-cycle duration can be achieved even when the compression factor is very large, and in contrast to standard soliton compression, these compressed pulses have minimal pedestal and high quality factor.

References in corpus (5)

• Nonlocal explanation of stationary and nonstationary regimes in cascaded soliton pulse compression
• Limits to compression with cascaded quadratic soliton compressors
• Ultrafast and octave-spanning optical nonlinearities from strongly phase-mismatched cascaded interactions
• 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

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The anisotropic Kerr nonlinear refractive index of the beta-barium borate (β-BaB2O4) nonlinear crystal
• Akhmediev Breathers and Peregrine Solitary Waves in a Quadratic Medium
• Soliton-induced nonlocal resonances observed through high-intensity tunable spectrally compressed second-harmonic peaks
• Solitons near avoided mode crossing in ${\chi }^{(2)}$ nanowaveguides