Solitary beam propagation in periodic layered Kerr media enables high-efficiency pulse compression and mode self-cleaning

Abstract

Generating intense ultrashort pulses with high-quality spatial modes is crucial for ultrafast and strong-field science and can be achieved by nonlinear supercontinuum generation (SCG) and pulse compression. In this work, we propose that the generation of quasi-stationary solitons in periodic layered Kerr media can greatly enhance the nonlinear light-matter interaction and fundamentally improve the performance of SCG and pulse compression in condensed media. With both experimental and theoretical studies, we successfully identify these solitary modes and reveal their unified condition for stability. Space-time coupling is shown to strongly influence the stability of solitons, leading to variations in the spectral, spatial and temporal profiles of femtosecond pulses. Taking advantage of the unique characteristics of these solitary modes, we first demonstrate single-stage SCG and the compression of femtosecond pulses from 170 to 22 fs with an efficiency >85%. The high spatiotemporal quality of the compressed pulses is further confirmed by high-harmonic generation. We also provide evidence of efficient mode self-cleaning, which suggests rich spatiotemporal self-organization of the laser beams in a nonlinear resonator. This work offers a route towards highly efficient, simple, stable and highly flexible SCG and pulse compression solutions for state-of-the-art ytterbium laser technology.

Active spintronic-metasurface terahertz emitters with tunable chirality

“…The highquality pulse compression is enabled by solitary beam propagation in periodic layered Kerr media. 43 The excitation pulse energy is ∼20 μJ, and the beam radius on the metasurface emitter is ∼1.1 mm (see Sec. S1 in the Supplementary Material for details on the experimental setup).…”

Composite acousto-optical modulation

“…The high pulse picking efficiency should in addition support one to iteratively apply the double-AOM system for multi-directional pulse routing at the GHz rate. The exceptionally broad rf-tuning range may help the composite AOM scheme to stabilize the carrier-envelop phase [17][18][19] of a few-cycle femtosecond pulse, in combination with the efficient and stable pulse compression technique recently developed [36]. Our method may also extend the modulation schemes and pulse shaping techniques used for coherent Raman imaging, enabling fast frequency, amplitude and polarization modulations, to achieve spectral multiplexing and background suppression [37][38][39].…”

A thermodynamic description of the near- and far-field intensity patterns emerging from multimode nonlinear waveguide arrays

“…Figure 3 depicts the logarithm of the function ζ(A, M ), which itself represents a departure from Eq. (5). The boundary between the regions where ζ(A, M ) is above or below 1% is also shown for M > 10.…”

“…During the last few years, nonlinear multimode optical systems have attracted considerable attention [1][2][3][4][5]. Along these lines, a host of new effects have been successfully observed.…”