Reverse design of the ideal pulse for hollow capillary fiber post-compression schemes

Abstract

The countless applications of ultrashort laser pulses in very different scientific areas explain the ongoing efforts to develop new strategies for the generation of light pulses with increasingly better characteristics. In this work, we theoretically study the application of the nonlinear reverse propagation method to produce few-cycle pulses with clean temporal profiles from standard post-compression setups based in hollow capillary fibers. By numerically solving the propagation of a desired goal pulse in the backward direction, we are able to predict the structure of the ideal input pulse that could be perfectly compressed in a given setup. Although the goal pulse cannot be chosen in a simple manner due to the fundamental symmetries of the nonlinear propagation equation, our analysis shows that the ideal pulse presents a recurring form and that, in general, both its intensity profile and phase must be shaped to recover the optimized goal output.

arXiv comment15 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Ultrashort filaments of light in weakly-ionized, optically-transparent media
• High-energy pulse self-compression and ultraviolet generation through soliton dynamics in hollow capillary fibres
• Compression of CEP-stable multi-mJ laser pulses down to 4 fs in long hollow fibers
• Infrared attosecond field transients and UV to IR few-femtosecond pulses generated by high-energy soliton self-compression
• Universal route to optimal few- to single-cycle pulse generation in hollow-core fiber compressors
• Single-shot implementation of dispersion-scan for the characterization of ultrashort laser pulses
• Non-linear Synthesis of Complex Laser Waveforms at Remote Distances
• Reversibility of laser filamentation
• Loss of Physical Reversibility in Reversible Systems