International audienceWe show that a standard hollow-core fiber (HCF) compressor device can be used to efficiently compress multi-mJ energy laser pulses down to few-cycle duration, when seeded with linearly chirped, circularly polarized pulses. With this approach, we routinely generate carrier-envelope phase (CEP)-locked, 1.6 mJ, 4.8 fs pulses using only 3 mJ, 25 fs pulses as the seed. © 2011 Pleiades Publishing, Ltd