We demonstrate the direct generation of sub-two-cycle pulses by soliton self-compression of femtosecond pulses from a Ti:sapphire laser at 85 MHz using a 4.85-mm-long highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber. Sub-nanojoule, 41 fs input pulses were compressed down to 4.6 fs without additional phase compensation schemes. To our knowledge, these are the shortest pulses obtained by soliton-effect compression of a laser oscillator. Efficient, near-dispersionless collimation of the fiber output was achieved with a simple lens and an octave-spanning double-chirped mirror pair. The full electric field of the compressed pulses was retrieved with a genetic algorithm applied to spectral and interferometric autocorrelation measurements, and the results are well described by numerical simulations.

The possibility of soliton self-compression of ultrashort laser pulses down to the few-cycle regime in photonic crystal fibers is numerically investigated. We show that efficient sub-two-cycle temporal compression of nanojoule-level 800 nm pulses can be achieved by employing short (typically 5-mmlong) commercially available photonic crystal fibers and pulse durations of around 100 fs, regardless of initial linear chirp, and without the need of additional dispersion compensation techniques. We envisage applications in a new generation of compact and efficient sub-two cycle laser pulse sources. * Electronic address: marco.tognetti@fc.up.pt

We present the coherent control of the temporal shape of laser pulses obtained by exploiting the propagation dynamics of electromagnetically induced transparency. Temporal compression, as a special case of pulse tailoring, is discussed. We envisage applications in nonlinear optics processes and control of pulse shapes in the vacuum ultraviolet spectral region

We present a theoretical and experimental study on the possibility of spectral manipulation of weak probe-laser pulses in the presence of dynamical electromagnetically induced transparency. We predict a spectral enlargement or narrowing process depending on whether the probe-laser pulse is overlapped by the rising or the falling edge of the coupling pulse, respectively. The results of an experiment in sodium atomic vapors confirm the theoretical predictions