Energetic mid-IR femtosecond pulse generation by self-defocusing soliton-induced dispersive waves in a bulk quadratic nonlinear crystal

Abstract

Generating energetic femtosecond mid-IR pulses is crucial for ultrafast spectroscopy, and currently relies on parametric processes that, while efficient, are also complex. Here we experimentally show a simple alternative that uses a single pump wavelength without any pump synchronization and without critical phase-matching requirements. Pumping a bulk quadratic nonlinear crystal (unpoled LiNbO${}_3$ cut for noncritical phase-mismatched interaction) with sub-mJ near-IR 50-fs pulses, tunable and broadband ($\sim 1,000$ cm${}^{-1}$) mid-IR pulses around $3.0\mu \mathrm{m}$ are generated with excellent spatio-temporal pulse quality, having up to 10.5 $\mu$J energy (6.3% conversion). The mid-IR pulses are dispersive waves phase-matched to near-IR self-defocusing solitons created by the induced self-defocusing cascaded nonlinearity. This process is filament-free and the input pulse energy can therefore be scaled arbitrarily by using large-aperture crystals. The technique can readily be implemented with other crystals and laser wavelengths, and can therefore potentially replace current ultrafast frequency-conversion processes to the mid-IR.

arXiv commentsubmitted

References in corpus (11)

• Looking at a soliton through the prism of optical supercontinuum
• Negative frequency resonant radiation
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• Ultrafast and octave-spanning optical nonlinearities from strongly phase-mismatched cascaded interactions
• Scaling laws for soliton pulse compression by cascaded quadratic nonlinearities
• Generating mid-IR octave-spanning supercontinua and few-cycle pulses with solitons in phase-mismatched quadratic nonlinear crystals
• Optical Cherenkov radiation by cascaded nonlinear interaction: an efficient source of few-cycle energetic near- to mid-IR pulses
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• Efficient supercontinuum generation in quadratic nonlinear waveguides without quasi-phase matching

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Observation of geometric parametric instability induced by the periodic spatial self-imaging of multimode waves
• Novel mid-infrared dispersive wave generation in gas-filled PCF by transient ionization-driven changes in dispersion
• Photoionization-induced emission of tunable few-cycle mid-IR dispersive waves in gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber
• 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
• Parametrically tunable soliton-induced resonant radiation by three-wave mixing
• Mid-IR femtosecond frequency conversion by soliton-probe collision in phase-mismatched quadratic nonlinear crystals
• Peregrine solitons and resonant radiation in cubic and quadratic media