Terawatt Post compression of high energy fs pulses using ionization: A way to overcome the conventional limitation in energy of few optical cycle pulses

Abstract

Abstract. By using optical-field-ionization of helium we postcompress 50 fs pulses to 8 fs with a pulse energy of 8,7 mJ. Hence few cycle pulses were obtained with TW peak power and a good shot-to-shot stability.

Ionization-Induced Self-Compression of Tightly Focused Femtosecond Laser Pulses

“…Ionization induced spectral broadening [15] for postcompression has become an attractive idea in several recent studies [16][17][18][19][20] because of its potential to scale to highenergy pulses and overcome the energy limit typically found in self-phase-modulation and filamentation methods. However, since ionization also results in a transverse refractive index variation, an external guiding structure, such as a large diameter capillary waveguide, is required for moderate interaction lengths (typically on the order of 10 cm).…”