Direct compression of 170-fs 50-cycle pulses down to 1.5 cycles with 70% transmission

Young-Gyun Jeong; Riccardo Piccoli; Denis Ferachou; Vincent Cardin; Michael Chini; Steffen Hädrich; Jens Limpert; Roberto Morandotti; François Légaré; Bruno E Schmidt; Luca Razzari

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-30198-y

Direct compression of 170-fs 50-cycle pulses down to 1.5 cycles with 70% transmission

Sci Rep. 2018 Aug 7;8(1):11794. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-30198-y.

Authors

Young-Gyun Jeong¹, Riccardo Piccoli¹, Denis Ferachou^{1

2}, Vincent Cardin^{1

2}, Michael Chini³, Steffen Hädrich⁴, Jens Limpert^{5

6}, Roberto Morandotti^{1

7

8}, François Légaré¹, Bruno E Schmidt⁹, Luca Razzari¹⁰

Affiliations

¹ Centre Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS-EMT), 1650 Boulevard Lionel-Boulet, Varennes, Québec, J3X 1S2, Canada.
² few-cycle Inc., 2890 Rue de Beaurivage, Montréal, Québec, H1L 5W5, Canada.
³ Department of Physics and CREOL, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, 32816, USA.
⁴ Active Fiber Systems GmbH, Ernst-Ruska-Ring 11, 07745, Jena, Germany.
⁵ Institute of Applied Physics, Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Albert-Einstein-Str. 15, 07745, Jena, Germany.
⁶ Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering, Albert-Einstein-Str. 7, 07745, Jena, Germany.
⁷ ITMO University, 199034, St. Petersburg, Russia.
⁸ Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, Sichuan, China.
⁹ few-cycle Inc., 2890 Rue de Beaurivage, Montréal, Québec, H1L 5W5, Canada. schmidt@few-cycle.com.
¹⁰ Centre Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS-EMT), 1650 Boulevard Lionel-Boulet, Varennes, Québec, J3X 1S2, Canada. razzari@emt.inrs.ca.

Abstract

We present a straightforward route for extreme pulse compression, which relies on moderately driving self-phase modulation (SPM) over an extended propagation distance. This avoids that other detrimental nonlinear mechanisms take over and deteriorate the SPM process. The long propagation is obtained by means of a hollow-core fiber (HCF), up to 6 m in length. This concept is potentially scalable to TW pulse peak powers at kW average power level. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate 33-fold pulse compression of a 1 mJ, 6 kHz, 170 fs Yb laser down to 5.1 fs (1.5 cycles at 1030 nm), by employing a single HCF and subsequent chirped mirrors with an overall transmission of 70%.