The measurement and control of light field oscillations enable the study of ultrafast phenomena on sub-cycle time scales. Electro-optic sampling (EOS) is a powerful field characterization approach, in terms of both sensitivity and dynamic range, but it has not reached beyond infrared frequencies. Here, we show the synthesis of a sub-cycle infrared-visible pulse and subsequent complete electric field characterization using EOS. The sampled bandwidth spans from 700 nm to 2700 nm (428 to 110 THz). Tailored electric-field waveforms are generated with a two-channel field synthesizer in the infrared-visible range, with a full-width at half-maximum duration as short as 3.8 fs at a central wavelength of 1.7 µm (176 THz). EOS detection of the complete bandwidth of these waveforms extends it into the visible spectral range. To demonstrate the power of our approach, we use the sub-cycle transients to inject carriers in a thin quartz sample for nonlinear photoconductive field sampling with sub-femtosecond resolution.
These authors contributed equally to this work.The development of high-energy, high-power, multi-octave light-transients is currently subject of intense research driven by emerging applications in attosecond spectroscopy and coherent control. We report on a phase-stable, multi-octave source based on a Yb:YAG amplifier for light-transient generation. We demonstrate the amplification of a two-octave spectrum to 25 µJ of energy in two broadband amplification channels and their temporal compression to 6 fs and 18 fs at 1 µm and 2 µm, respectively. In this scheme due to the intrinsic temporal synchronization between the pump and seed pulses, the temporal jitter is restricted to long-term drift. We show that the intrin-1 arXiv:1911.00545v1 [physics.optics] 1 Nov 2019 sic stability of the synthesizer allows for sub-cycle detection of an electric field at 0.15 PHz. The complex electric field of the 0.15 PHz pulses and their freeinduction decay after interaction with water molecules are resolved by electrooptic sampling over 2 ps. The scheme is scalable in peak-and average-power.
TeaserWe report on a novel source for generating high energy, sub-cycle pulses based on a Yb thindisk laser.
Figure 4. a) EOS (in red) and b) LPS (in blue) spectral response functions calculated with different GDD values applied to the VIS-UV pulse. c) EOS response calculated for a compressed VIS-UV pulse and different crystal thicknesses.
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