Infrared attosecond field transients and UV to IR few-femtosecond pulses generated by high-energy soliton self-compression

Abstract

Infrared femtosecond laser pulses are important tools both in strong-field physics, driving X-ray high-harmonic generation, and as the basis for widely tuneable, if inefficient, ultrafast sources in the visible and ultraviolet. Although anomalous material dispersion simplifies compression to few-cycle pulses, attosecond pulses in the infrared have remained out of reach. We demonstrate soliton self-compression of 1800 nm laser pulses in hollow capillary fibers to sub-cycle envelope duration (2 fs) with 27 GW peak power, corresponding to attosecond field transients. In the same system, we generate wavelength-tuneable few-femtosecond pulses from the ultraviolet (300 nm) to the infrared (740 nm) with energy up to 25 $\mu$J and efficiency up to 12 %, and experimentally characterize the generation dynamics in the time-frequency domain. A compact second stage generates multi-$\mu$J pulses from 210 nm to 700 nm using less than 200 $\mu$J of input energy. Our results significantly expand the toolkit available to ultrafast science.

arXiv comment8 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (9)

• High-energy pulse self-compression and ultraviolet generation through soliton dynamics in hollow capillary fibres
• Supercontinuum generation in the vacuum ultraviolet through dispersive-wave and soliton-plasma interaction in noble-gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber
• Generation of micro-J pulses in the deep UV at MHz repetition rates
• Effect of anti-crossings with cladding resonances on ultrafast nonlinear dynamics in gas-filled PCFs
• Generation of Broadband Mid-IR and UV Light in Gas-Filled Single-Ring Hollow-Core PCF
• Direct characterisation of tuneable few-femtosecond dispersive-wave pulses in the deep UV
• High-energy ultraviolet dispersive-wave emission in compact hollow capillary systems
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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Efficient and compact source of tuneable ultrafast deep ultraviolet laser pulses at 50 kHz repetition rate
• Dispersion-tuning of nonlinear optical pulse dynamics in gas-filled hollow capillary fibers
• Timing and energy stability of resonant dispersive wave emission in gas-filled hollow-core waveguides
• Decoupled few-femtosecond phase transitions in vanadium dioxide
• Measurements of microjoule-level, few-femtosecond ultraviolet dispersive-wave pulses generated in gas-filled hollow capillary fibers
• Ultrafast circularly polarized pulses tunable from the vacuum to deep ultraviolet
• Robust isolated attosecond pulse generation with self-compressed sub-cycle drivers from hollow capillary fibers
• Optical Interference Effect in Strong-field Electronic Coherence Spectroscopy
• Reverse design of the ideal pulse for hollow capillary fiber post-compression schemes