Strategies for achieving intense single-cycle pulses with in-line post-compression setups

Abstract

Intense few- and single-cycle pulses are powerful tools in different fields of science Today, third- and higher-order terms in the remnant spectral phase of the pulses remain a major obstacle for obtaining high-quality few- and single-cycle pulses from in-line post-compression setups. In this Letter, we show how input pulse shaping can successfully be applied to standard post-compression setups to minimize the occurrence of high-order phase components during nonlinear propagation and to directly obtain pulses with durations down to 3 fs. Furthermore, by combining this pulse shaping of the input pulse with new-generation broadband chirped mirrors and material addition for remnant third-order phase correction, pulses down to 2.2 fs duration have been measured.

High-energy pulse self-compression and ultraviolet generation through soliton dynamics in hollow capillary fibres

“…While post-compression can be optimised to produce high-quality single-cycle pulses [37], shorter pulses require the use of multiple chirped-mirror sets [46,53]. Soliton self-compression offers a much less complex and lower-cost route to sub-cycle pulse generation.…”

“…1a. In this way compression to few-and even single-cycle pulses can be achieved at high pulse energies up to a few mJ [13,[33][34][35][36][37][38].…”

Theoretical analysis of single-cycle self-compression of near infrared pulses using high-spatial modes in capillary fibers

“…It was first used to generate ultra-short pulses in the mJ regime, employing a phase compensation system to eliminate the spectral phase acquired during the nonlinear propagation process [6,7]. This post-compression set-up has become the most standard compression technique for femtosecond pulses at the millijoule level with impressive results [8].…”

Direct measurement of intense sub-4-fs pulses in a gas target by 3rd-harmonic dispersion-scan

“…Techniques such as spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER), in its spatially encoded arrangement (SEA)-SPIDER [1] implementation, have been successfully used to measure sub-4-fs pulses and are an important part of attosecond technology today [2]. More recently, dispersion-scan (d-scan) [3] has proven to be a robust method for accessing and controlling near-single-cycle pulses [4], with durations down to 1.04-cycles (2.2 fs) already demonstrated [5]. Experimentally, the d-scan technique is based on measuring the spectrum of a nonlinear signal (e.g., second-harmonic generation) as a function of dispersion.…”